War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength - Orwell's 1984
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Dell sold exceedingly bad desktops
TIN BOX MAKER Dell's executives might be red-faced this week after the company was accused of selling desktop PCs that it knew contained faulty components and then trying to cover up it all up.
According to court papers just unsealed and reported on by the New York Times, the web hosting service Advanced Internet Technologies (AIT) flung these allegations in Dell's face way back in 2007.
AIT said that employees at the firm knew that its Optiplex PCs were 'likely to break', according to the NYT. The paper added that Dell had managed to sell upwards of 11 million of the blighted desktops, mostly to its corporate accounts.
Optiplex PCs had problems ranging from bad capacitors to motherboard problems, which Dell strove to play down according to those involved
More damning perhaps, is the fact that sales and customer support people were apparently told to keep the problems under their hats.
"Dell salespeople were told to say 'don't bring this to customer's attention proactively,' in an effort to conceal system problems", according to the court documents obtained by the NYT.
The lawsuit hasn't gone to trial yet and unless you are still using a five year old desktop PC, made by Dell and called an Optiplex, you probably have nothing to worry about. Maybe. µ
Tags: Friction
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What's ironic for me is that I have maybe had two Optiplex's out of 30 fail circa that time period, but I am always dealing with busted Latitudes.
We've used Dell since 2003 and I've not personally experienced this situation with over 300 desktop purchases across 5 different companies. We still use Dell for the purchasing power we've established, good service they've provided us(they are currently blowing up my email to schedule a preventive maintenance) and the general lack of issues all around.
BTW, I have personally experienced this with Nichicon caps in my personal PCs using a range of Asus, eVGA and DFI mobos from that era though.
As mentioned yesterday, to learn more about the Nichicon capacitor issue, check out Lionel Menchaca's post on Direct2Dell http://bit.ly/d5r9J7
As mentioned yesterday, to learn more about the Nichicon capacitor issue, check out Lionel Menchaca's post on Direct2Dell http://bit.ly/d5r9J7
Or therefore lack of.
Cut down mainboards, cheap components and not built to last. What do you expect for £300. Buy a decent PC with paarts that have a 3 year warranty as STANDARD. Saves us lots of money and time not reparing hardware faults.
We think it's important to make clear that this was not a Dell-specific issue and that the lawsuit folks are talking about is three years old.
In situations where systems did fail due to the Nichicon capacitor issue, we worked directly with many customers to resolve. We also extended the warranty of impacted machines until January 2008, several years after they were purchased.
More to come soon on a Direct2Dell post...