Posted on 07/02/2010 1:13:53 PM PDT by Signalman
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- A six-year-old hardware meltdown that plagued millions of computers is coming back to haunt Dell.
From 2003 to 2005, Dell sold computers with faulty capacitors that allegedly caused most motherboards on two Dell Optiplex models to break, rendering the computers useless. Dell was aware of the issue, according to recently unsealed court documents from a pending lawsuit, yet continued to sell the computers anyway.
Though the juiciest details are still sealed by the court, several internal company e-mails show that Dell instructed its sales staff to downplay the malfunctions to customers.
"We need to avoid all language indicating the [mother]boards were bad or had 'issues,'" Jeff DilLullo, a Dell sales manager, wrote in a March 2004 e-mail.
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
Sheesh. My entire company has these computers.
I build my own computers. This is one reason why.
There is no excuse for selling faulty product once the problem is known.
I can’t speak to these technical issues, but we quit buying Dells for home when it became impossible to communicate with customer service reps in India. Dell might save money using this cheap labor, but they’ll end up losing customers in the long run if customer service becomes a nuisance.
No protection for you. These capacitors were used throughout the industry. I built a computer in 2003 which used capacitors from this supplier. Most of those I know who used the same board have had failures. Someone else is using my old computer now and haven't had any failures. I was one of the lucky ones. Electronic items other than computers have failed because of these capacitors.
But when you dig into it you find its the same motherboard companies building the mb for the Dells of the world as selling them off the shelf. Dell just got a few million dollars worth of bad ones instead of one. It just got too expensive to build them for me. I can buy a good pc off the shelf and upgrade the video card a lot cheaper than building it. And without the hassle.
Eh, just because you build your own computer, there is no way to know if the individual components on the MBs and cards are going to last or not. You can’t escape it unless you maybe decide to build with out of date components with a track record,
“I build my own computers”
Me too.
The computers i build for myself you could never buy in a store, and i save a bundle.
It starts witha a top shelf, award winning motherboard with only the features that i want.
An Intel proccesor that is budget minded but highly over-clockable.
A real sweet heat-sink for that proccesor. 20 bucks.
Not the most expensive video card but the video card that was the most expensive last year.
Hand-picked memory...
Etc, etc....
Then outsourced their support to places like India where the help could barely speak English...
About 8 years ago, I told Dell to go to hell.
Which may explain why pro-sumer class motherboards advertise the solid-state capacitors. Almost takes up as much marketing room as their relative "greenness"
That's exactly what we did...
That was the straw that broke the camels back for us with Dell.
I used to service Dells.
Dell Tech support? Pffff.....
I learned a long time ago to just tell them the computer is DEAD.
That was the only way i could get the part i need shipped without spending 2 hours with them and their scripted troubleshooting methods.
Not yet, My latest PC built I a year ago last Christmas is a Q6600 2.4 GHZ Quad overclocked to 3.4 GHZ.
Great for now.
The Aftermarket heatsink helped a lot.
With the stock HS i could only get it to 2.7 Ghz.
This problem was not just in Dell computers, every mainboard manufacture had these same problems during that time frame and these manufactures supplied mainboards to every computer manufacture including Apple.
The motherboard i bought for my 2005 build had the words “Japanese Built Capacitors” all over the box.
I was also a multi-award winning board.
180 bucks at the time.
It was a great board, It was a A-Bit “Fatality” gaming board. i asked my IT buddy last week that i sold it to how it was running.
Says it’s the best PC hes ever had..and it’s a P4.
I sold it cause i like to play war games and it became obsolete.
I would NEVER buy a store bought computer and wouldn’t let my close friends or family buy one either.
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