Dell is finding itself in hot legal water after allegedly selling PCs the OEM vendor knew contained faulty components, recently unsealed court documents reveal.
According to the court documents, Dell employees were aware that the OptiPlex PCs sold to customers between May 2003 to July 2005 were likely to fail. During that time period, Dell shipped about 11.8 million OptiPlex computers.
The cause of the problems has been identified as bad capacitors, which not only affected Dell, but several other PC makers and mobo vendors as well. According to court documents, Dell salespeople were told to say "don't bring this to customer's attention proactively."
According to Dell, however, the OEM had addressed the problem at the time, and current customers have nothing to worry about either.
"Dell worked with customers to address their issues, and Dell extended the warranties on all OptiPlex motherboards to January 2008 in order to address the Nichicon capacitor problem," said David Frink, a Dell spokesman. "The AIT lawsuit does not involve any current Dell products. Dell is responsive to customer issues and we continue to remain focused on our customers, their needs, and our growing record of superior customer service."
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DavidD2546
July 23, 2010 at 12:41pm
You guys should check out the company I use DakTech Computers.
I went with them after having too many issues with my Dell's. They are out of Fargo ND and called DakTech Computers. They offer a 7 Year Warranty on all of their desktops and servers. Great Intel based machines. Never have had any issues and if I ever have any questions or concerns, I just call and someone picks up the phone in their tech department and talks to me. Absolutely the best PC company I have ever dealt with in my life. Ask for David in sales and he will take care of you.
DogPatch1149
July 01, 2010 at 10:43am
Replaced many, many of those mobos for several customers a few years ago. Dell owned up to the problem and fixed them, though they could have responded a bit faster.
Think HP is wonderful? Why won't they acknowledge the true scope of the nVidia "bumping" defect that plagues their laptops from the mid and late 2000s?
TheDorkSide
July 01, 2010 at 9:45am
I had bunch of 270's and 280's at a bank I worked at during that time. Dell knew about the issue. All I had to say was SFF 270/280 and leaking caps in the same sentence and they sent me a new board the next day. I thought they handled the support of this fine. I'm on the fence on dinging Dell with this one. Yeah they sold a bum product, but they owned up to it and corrected the issues as they came.
Edit--In my new IT shop at another bank we're all running corporate HP's.
ebeale
July 01, 2010 at 7:19am
We had a bunch of Optiplex 260 quite a few years ago that had capacitors that started to leak. Dell was good and replaced all the mainboards even after the warrantee expired.
COMMANDER_COOK
July 01, 2010 at 2:53pm
My high school has a load of 260s. They're still running strong, but the 745s that replaced them are having problems...
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lunchbox73
July 01, 2010 at 6:15am
Interesting. We've had a few bum Optiplexes over the last few years so I believe it. The new Latitude line seems pretty buggy too.
big_montana
July 01, 2010 at 5:49am
Trust me, this is true. My firm had over 700 of these defective POS's. the motherboards failed on all of them at one point. We eventually convinced Dell to replce the mobo's again as the replacement boards were failing as well. That did no good as those boards fialed also. Dell, as usual, ignored the complaints and told us we were just runninng them to hard and to long. When it came time to upgrade our hardware, despite my protestations, my firm stayed with Dell. Now we are having issues with the Latitude E4300 seiries and Dell is totally ignoring the problem. If you work on battery for while, than switch to the adaptor, it totally hard locks the laptop. The only time this does not happen is if you line up the barrel of the plug with the connector and plug it in very slowly, or leave teh adaptor unplugged from teh wall and plug it into the laptop first than plug it in. But, Dell states there is no issue, depsite hundreds of complaints to the contrary on their forums. Dell is Hell, and hoepfully next time we upgrade my firm takes my advice and purchases Lenovo's
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