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Dell Selling Faulty PCs
An anonymous reader writes "PC maker Dell has been accused of selling thousands of desktop PCs despite knowing the machines contained faulty components, according to recently unsealed court documents first reported about on Tuesday by The New York Times."
I bought three last week, and their customer service already knew what was going on. A tech already came out next-day to replace the faulty components. No questions asked. Next?
Water is wet: Details at 11.
"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one." -- Fight Club.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Dude, you're going through hell!
To get to the bad capacitors part.
Nothing in the write-up and lots of narrative about dell quality and outsourcing blather.
In short, every company of every type that used these parts got screwed.
... of course it is faulty.
Well, after so many years seeing software makers get away with it, I can understand them trying it out.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
We don't talk about this.....
Over a year after I bought my Precision M90 laptop, I tried to upgrade it to 4GB RAM. Turns out there's a hardware limitation (in the northbridge, I believe) which prevents more than 3.25GB from being accessible. No mention of it anywhere, in fact the documentation says the laptop supports 4GB! Liars.
Haven't you ever owned one?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Dude, you're getting a dell.
I remember severe issues with the SFF GX150 some years ago. If you ever had one fry and need a motherboard replacement, that is because the Power Supply's fan was reversed; instead of pulling hot air out, it forced hot air into the case. I informed Dell and more than 80% of the GX150's I had were like this. They never owned up to the problem and just kept going, replacing dozens of motherboards along the way. Idiots!
The truth is usually just an excuse for lack of imagination.
Bad caps how cheap can dell be?
Beep beep - it's the Surprised Bus!
I've had seven dells, and they've all been perfect!
I've had two dells, and both died early! I'll never buy dell again
FIRST POST!
People know Dell squeezes component suppliers. What do they expect?
Of course it had defective components! What do you call Windows?
This is why I buy Macs
So what? Are you saying Macs don't use capacitors?
Dude! You're...Insert Whitty variation here...
now move along. Nothing else to see here...
I remember back in the 90's when I used to recommend them (not only for their quality computers, but also excellent customer service). But in more recent years, their stuff (in my experience) is garbage. They've become what Compaq and Packard Bell used to be.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The article states the PCs were sold between 2003 and 2005, and they suffered from a rash of bad capacitors produced in Asia. The bad capacitors affected other computer manufacturers as well, but seemed to affect Dell worse.
This information is nothing new, and essentially it sounds like the problem was so bad, and infiltrated the industry to such a depth, that even replacement machines would likely fail from bad capacitors as well.
The tiny summary specifically makes it sound like Dell is selling machines with these problems now, which is totally misleading.
Better known as 318230.
...otherwise, sir, please turn in your geek card immediately.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
n/t
didnt most motherboards from that era have bad capacitors due to cheap components used in factories in China / Taiwan?
most good companies changes from traditional capacitors to solid-state capacitors at this point.
some companies had good support and even offered to resoldier GOOD capacitors in-place of the failed ones...
These were Dell Optiplex 280 systems if I remember correctly. This is relatively old news and the only new part of this whole story seems to be the lawsuit. It was a water damaged shipment of capacitors that Dell bought at a huge discount. They knew from the beginning that the capcatiros would either leak or mountain-top and waited for 2 years to initiate a recall.
"Friends don't let friends buy Dell"
How could this be news? Everyone who bought those faulty capacitors from IIRC Nichicon faced same problems. Pretty much every single motherboard made back then had or has this problem. Neither is a long string of denials by a major corporation something new. Share value is sharply affected by such bad news, so noone who has trading stock will admit to anything, for as long as possible.
There are two sides to this:
1. Corporate greed.
2. Investor greed.
#1 is clearly understood. #2 means that share values are not influenced much by the financials of the underlying corporation. So tens of thousands, no, hundreds of thousands of investors, and automated trading systems, track such news and immediately sell upon hearing "bad news". Now the problem is that there is no way to actually see how such news will affect the financials of the company -- at least not immediately. Yet the markets *do* react immediately, in the most irrational manner, to all sorts of bad news.
I thought that we pretty much filed the Nichicon industrial espionage fiasco into relevant "history to be learned from" folders.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
"Dell has been accused of selling thousands of desktop PCs despite knowing the machines contained faulty components"
I didn't realize that the Windows installation was considered a component.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
I cannot tell you how many times I have replaced the boards off an OptiPlex 270 and then the 280. It was just freaking insane. Dell's response was just horrid as well.
I mean, the sales people could blab all they want, but one look at the board and it was evident from a layperson that something was wrong. The best we could do as contractors is to just state its an "industry wide problem" (true) and that Dell will fix any system affected (partially true). I might like Dell, but I am not getting lynched by an irate manager because their sales team can't tell a straight lie.
I mean hell, there was not a DAY that went by that I didn't have 2 of those boards to be replaced. Not a week went by when the board sent that was "refurbished" didn't have the same issue. Toward the end, we started having motherboard swapping contests and I could do a 270 in under 5 min, if it was in front of me.
I do like what one client did. He apparently worked on the old XT systems and once he found out about the problem, he just replaced the affected caps himself
Prior to the work I am doing now, I used to run the EUS department for a nationwide company. Our Dell rep was pretty upfront with us about the overheating caps issue on mobos. In short, we were told that while it would impact our company's workflow, it was cheaper for them to provide next day support and over night the parts to repair the issues than to perform a recall on the bad mobos. This was primarily affecting Dell GX 320s. It was nothing that was hidden from us, and we were given a special deal on future machines to compensate. But in the end for them, it's the bottom line. All companys that provide a product would have the same view. Does the cost of a recall surpass that of the parts and labor to repair any reported issues? If so, just provide support.
GM released certain models where the stepper motors for the odometers where bunk. they quickly came in for repair and were fixed no questions asked... the only problem was that they were fixed with the same defective part because GM couldn't get good motors built fast enough. the thought was to fix them make the customer happy and then fix them again with good parts when they broke again.
the customer was happy i guess, up until the second or third visit.
lots of that kind of thing with the radios too.
i shudder to think how bad it's gonna be under the new management.
"You're getting an OoGhiJ MiQtxxXA"
Living With a Nerd
It should be noted that the article indicates Dell went to great lengths to avoid telling customers about the problem.
They've been selling faulty laptops as well.
Granted, the issue with several of their laptop models lies with the Nvidia GPU die packaging; Dell still refuses to extend extend warranties on some of the laptops that suffer from this issue.
For example, the XPS M1210 has this exact problem, and suffers from the die package over heading even more than other models because it's the smallest form factor (which means it's harder to keep cool).
I had a personal vendetta with Dell a few years ago because they refused to provide warranty extensions for the M1210. I had spent ~30+ hours on the phone, being handed off to one customer service department after the other like a game of hot potato.
Eventually I found somebody online who managed to somehow get the right tech support at the right time, and had their mobo replaced under warranty extension. I used his case # as a reference, and Dell finally gave in.
I then made a post here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-xps-studio-xps/361004-how-get-your-dead-xps-m1210-fixed.html#post4611553 [notebookreview.com]
This is a listing of M1210's that have been fixed under warranty, and their case numbers. So if anybody here has this problem, reference these numbers and Dell will honor their fuck up.
Every one of the couple dozen GX270s in our department failed due to bad caps. The failure rate was over 100% because Dell would ship us replacement motherboards that also had bad caps, just like TFA mentioned. Some of our machines went through three board replacements, all of which eventually failed.
When they finally went out of warranty, our hardware guy just bought a batch of decent caps and replaced all of them when a board failed. Problem solved.
However, that being said, my dell PCs and Servers are extraordinary with support with 4 hour support in my area I often have part in hand less than 2 hours after the phone call. Dell has always done a good job here, and also does a great job of chassis design with the end tech in mind. They also design items that, in my mind, are more intuitive and have practical purpose. No weird theoretical "everyone should be doing this" nonsense...ahem I'm looking at you IBM. Dell R&D has always seemed to have a good line on what the SMB market wants. I cannot speak to big business though, try to stay away from there :)
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
It's a running joke where I work that anyone asking us to fix a Dell Inspiron will have a faulty hard drive, the WD Scorpio Blue drives they're fitting to their newer laptops are cheap and nasty with a high failure rate, Dell seem oblivious to the problems when we've spoken to them.
Isn't it customary with other industries to issue re-call notices and for companies to partner with local repair businesses (which in this case could be on or off site service technicians) to repair or replace machines that get identified by customers as part of the recall? When will this be standard practice in the computer industry like it is in others?
Has Dell ever sold anything but faulty machines?
or else!
I designed the XP image for a chain of retirement communities. The first rollout was on 120 Optiplex GX270 desktops... all of which were affected by this.
Fortunately, only one of them died in the initial rollout. By the time they started going bad en masse, the image was ruled out as the cause... and the blown capacitors were clearly visible... and the story was already known online.
This seems clever and insightful, but the formula fails to include a number of factors.
How about:
D - "The likelihood we can cover this up and will never be found out"
Diminishes over time, exponentially if the problem persists
E - "The damage to our reputation and long-term viability as a company when we're inevitably caught covering this up"
Asymptotically approaches infinity.
F - "The long term goodwill we engender by telling the truth and making things right"
If managed right, more important to the survival of the company than any other factor.
Dell was never in my list of top hardware companies, but now they are right at the top of my worst list. I'll never buy from them again and I will advise others against doing so, citing this kind of behavior as evidence. I hope they fail and vanish from the face of the earth to be replaced by another company that's much better at their business than they are. Good riddance.
There. That's what their strategy of lying and obfuscation got them.
Damage to personal reputation can destroy the lives of individuals, it should do so to companies as well, and deservedly so. Toyota realizes this and is working hard to make amends. They will very likely survive and thrive again. BP seems to be somewhat clueless about this, but I predict their arrogance will bite them in the ass eventually and they will either be bought out or have to undergo an identity wipe in an attempt to erase themselves from peoples memories.
A friend of mine bought two brand new XPS systems two months ago and both of them went including the first replacement that he received. All three had MB go on them. I bought a brand new XPS 9000 around the same time but so far no problems.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
What happens to the data in memory when your computer is crashing all the time? Data is not exclusive to the hard drive. And guess where the hard drives connect on virtually all Dell desktops? The motherboard! When the largest caps on a mobo fail, where do you think those are? They're at the power input mains and play a part in voltage regulation... and in the moment where they fail and go out of specifications / operating parameters, what do you think can happen? Voltage spike through the circuit, conceivably even up to the hard drives.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
The actual problem was bad enough, but instead of owning up to it Dell decided to mount a PR campaign aimed at emphasizing uncertainty. And told their reps to lie about it.
The actual problem didn't bother me as much as Dell's response.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Now that I got your attention, I will then mention that this incident occurred back in the 90's when millions of PCs were sold were affected by the Pentium FDIV bug, an industry wide problem at the time, just like the capacitors. This past problem has no bearing on current products sold and most computers that were sold during the great capacitor plague are now considered obsolete. Any surviving units are likely to have capacitors without the defective formulation otherwise they would have most probably have died by now.
I had over a dozen Optiplex GX280 machines plagued by this issue. These had been purchased in mid-to-late 2005, and began to fail in early 2007. Dell extended the warranty on all of the machines affected by the bad capacitors, I got a free replacement board for every one of these.
Issues with electronics happen this issue also effected HP and Apple. Dell just seems to be the one getting signaled out. I have built custom computers in the past and I have had boards break just part of the unreliability of hardware sometimes.
http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
Macs work by moving good karma around. If you ever open up one of their machines, there's not actually anything in there! This is not advisable though as opening them causes the karma to run out and they never work correctly again once you do this.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This is interesting to me because every open-source license, and every click-through license I've ever laid eyes on has the "merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose" clause in it. So how, then, does Turing MACHINERY have to meet this criteria, when the Turing TAPE does not?
P.S. Why are <blockquote> and <br> so borken in teh slashcode???
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
someone makes the obvious "Dell has been selling faulty PCs for years; they ship their PCs with Windows" joke.
Oh wait.
Actually i have bought one of these computers, and at the moment i haven't had any prob
Dude... You're getting a dell. =(
That's why you should migrate from Dell to Apple. When all your Apple computers fail, you'll know it wasn't shoddy components, it was just a design flaw.
How exactly do you send a corporation to maximum security prison?
You don't, you give it the death penalty. Carve it up and sell the parts to the highest bidder. Confiscate all bonuses from the corporate officers involved in the decision, use the proceeds from the sale and bonuses to pay off any 401(k) retirement plans invested in the company. Let the other shareholders eat the loss as a warning to perform better due diligence and not invest in criminal organizations. After all, if you invested in the mob and they got busted, you wouldn't get your money back, right? Organized crime is organized crime, it doesn't matter if the leader of one organization graduated from Yale and the other graduated from jail. If a corporation engages in criminal behavior, kill it with extreme prejudice and make all responsible suffer. If investors get burned a few times, they will make it a point to only invest in socially responsible, ethical companies.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Actually, badcaps failure modes are so often so nasty that they can certainly cause data loss. They computer won't just 'fail' at once, but will probably begin with silent corruption as power availability teeters on the edge of tolerances, then move into crashes as memory and other components gets more significantly underpowered during load, then go on to many crashes per day, into crashes during recovery and then eventually death.
If you identify the problem during the first phase, after a few random software crashes, then you probably won't have significant data loss. But if you get to the point where you've had a dozen crashes during recovery attempts, then you may end up with partially corrupt file systems and certainly a few missing files.
who modded this down?
It seems to me that's standard for the software industry. They don't even try to fix "all the known bugs" before ship. They ship operating systems and other big software systems with long lists of current known bugs that they plan to fix in production long after release. Many software companies charge for those updates.
Back before PC's became common, if you bought an appliance and it didn't work perfectly -- every time (no bs about powering off and back on to finish washing your laundry) -- it would be considered defective and the brand name would take a major hit.
The PC industry has made "bug fix" common on appliances of all kinds more common.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
HA! Good one! Oh man, you're fucking HILARIOUS!!!! You should take that act on the road. Seriously. You could make $5-10 a night, easy. You better leave now and get started.
Seriously, get the fuck out of here, moron.
"I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" -- Captain Renault, Casablanca
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The majority of PCs they sell have Windows installed...
The college I went to up until last year used nothing but Dells in all the computer labs. What a nightmare.
They all always seem to RUN, but they ALL have input device problems. We had these P3s in the one lab, and you'd get halfway through class and the keyboard and mice would fail on about half the machines. New mice and keyboards didn't help, and they locked up if you plugged most USB devices. All you could do is sit there and look at your inaccessible work.
The PIV and Core 2 Insipirons all had major USB port problems. For one thing, they pointed at the ground at a 45 degree angle, and only detected USB thumbdrives about half the time. Sometimes, plugging anything in would lead to an instant reboot.
The Core 2 Inspirons were the worst, because they didn't have have PS/2 ports. For some reason, unless you plugged the keyboard and mice into the top two slots on the motherboards, they didn't work. Even then, it usually took several reboots after unplugging them. It took us hours to get them all to work when we moved them to set up for a programming contest.
When someone comes into an IRC channel and moans about USB Port issues, I usually respond "What Model Dell?" The reply is usually Inspiron.
I had to repair a PIV Inspiron once, but I had to ask for the keyboard for it because none of the USB keyboards I had would work and it didn't have PS/2 ports. Its kind of embarrassing.
...the school had overtaxed the machines by making them perform difficult math calculations.
Obviously designing the PC using the Barbie "Math is hard, let's go shopping" chip was a mistake!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Around the timeframe discussed in the article, the company I was working for had IBM desktop PCs. We had exactly the same problem in a few models - faulty capacitors caused them to fail early. The solution was easy - replace the motherboards.
However, there are two major issues at stake here:
1. How Dell handled the issue as a whole. According to TFA, they tried to hush it up. Anyone with half a brain in the IT industry at the time could see exactly what was going on, quite how anyone at Dell concluded that they could succeed in a cover-up is beyond me.
2. How every major vendor handled dealing with individual customers. At the time, more than one company had a very strict policy that their helpdesk staff wouldn't deal with issues concerning more than one system in a call. It's one thing to have to put the phone down and call again when you've got two or three systems to get a tech sent out for and once they're done they're done, it's quite another when you've got a few systems failing every damn day and your own IT staff are spending more time on the phone to your vendor to get a tech out than they are on the phone to your own staff they're meant to be providing support for. Ideally you'd want to arrange to identify every affected system in the business and get motherboards in all of them replaced, but this generally takes a certain degree of negotiation because no vendor wants to pay for this (even if the buck stops with them).
It took us some serious discussion with IBM (probably helped by the fact that our parent company spend £several million/annum) to get every motherboard replaced, knowing Dell I wouldn't be surprised if few if any of their customers succeeded in getting this done.
I remember severe issues with the SFF GX150 some years ago. If you ever had one fry and need a motherboard replacement, that is because the Power Supply's fan was reversed; instead of pulling hot air out, it forced hot air into the case. I informed Dell and more than 80% of the GX150's I had were like this. They never owned up to the problem and just kept going, replacing dozens of motherboards along the way. Idiots!
This was a feature. It was intended to keep hot air from escaping into the office warming it to an uncomfortable level. A higher end machine was planned with a reversable fan for the winter time.
...that Dell still sells Windows PCs. ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
"The problems affecting the Dell computers stemmed from an industrywide encounter with bad capacitors produced by Asian PC component suppliers."
No kidding. It was a disaster that affected everybody that used these capacitors. The story here is that Dell apparently knew about the nature of the problem but tried to downplay it for years to avoid replacing defective boards, and then they replaced them with boards that would probably also fail.
You give the fields of public relations and image management short shrift. They exist primarily to make the problems you outline disappear.
D - The likelihood we can pay someone to cover this up in the short term, which is all that seems to matter to corporate officers anyhow, is pretty high.
E - History shows that damage to a corporate reputation can be easily managed. It does not asymptotically approach infinity, as the Ford Pinto clearly demonstrates. Does anyone today refrain from buying Ford because the Pinto killed people? I think not.
F - It is much cheaper to simply lie copiously through advertising and PR to generate that goodwill. After all, it isn't about the truth, but perception. Perceptions can be bought.
In ten years, Dell will still be around but your memory of this incident won't be. You will most likely be buying Dell again.
Toyota will very likely survive and thrive again?!? They are thriving right now, they are the largest in terms of sales and production. Even BP isn't going to go under without help. Hell, what would a boycott of BP do? They still own the oil, which is only going to become more valuable over time. Oil underground is money in the bank, it even collects interest. BP isn't going anywhere, this will barely be a blip on the balance sheets in twenty years.
You see, all corporations suck to some extent. And people have busy lives. They don't remember the fact that some big faceless corporation screwed them over, that is a non event because it happens all the time. You live with it. You forget. When Exxon and Mobile merged, did they drop the Exxon part of the name because of the Exxon Valdez spill? Of course not, and ExxonMobile is doing just peachy.
I'd love to live in a world like the one you imagine, where fairness and justice just happen, because everyone does their part to stand up to evil. It would be a better world than this one.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
probably you, by accident, so you replied as AC in order to un-down-mod. cause right now there is no mods on the comment up or down, except the karma boost.
... faulty towers? Is John Cleese helping with the advertising?
I currently have several hundred optiplexs in deployment. Is there anyway we can find a specific model list of units that are effected?
I don't know.
Obligatory pun: http://cheezburger.com/View/3696285952
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
"E - "The damage to our reputation and long-term viability as a company when we're inevitably caught covering this up"
Asymptotically approaches infinity."
You haven't been paying attention to Corporate America in the last decade, have you? Long term thinking doesn't exist. It's all about meeting short term revenue projections.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Hard drive failure is not the only form of data loss. Unsaved files and power loss during file operations can cause data loss.
ERROR: SIG NOT FOUND (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?:
stop talking about yourself
rewriting history since 2109
Nevermind that anonymouse MS employee, this is a FANTASTIC time to buy a Dell! Their quality will go up a good 25% over the next two weeks. After that, same-ol' same-ol'.
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
I repair computers at home for people who cannot afford geek squad, best buy etc. Many old dells like these have been across my bench, invariably after the warranty was over, the end user was stuck with the cost. Of course I helped then out by replacing the board with an afforadble ECS model or an ASROCK. Still sad that many single mothers and people on welfare, shut ins etc. that I help out were stuck with the cost, while thinking they were getting a good deal from DELL.
I've always known that the multi-billion dollar computer companies sell crappy hardware to the little guy. If you spend $5,000 on a computer from dell, hp, ect, you'll get a decent PC. However, the average joe that will spend as little as possible to get a running computer will be very disappointed when the things craps out. This is when I am called to fix the problem, usually hd, mb or in most cases psu. This is nothing new. I've been fixing the big name company's screw-ups for years and I hope they keep screwing it up: gives me business!
There's a lot of Dell bashing in this thread. I guess most here build their own machines, I used to but now I use a laptop. Since I only buy machines for personal use, I don't have much experience of which suppliers are reliable etc.
/.ers recommend?
Does the Dell aversion extend to laptops? If so, which manufacturers to
I think the [MS Word] paperclip is a great idea. - Miguel de Icaza
And yet, back in 2005 when I was dealing with this issue, the FIRST thing the Gold Support reps told me to check was the Capacitors. The reps (I spoke to several) were quite candid about there having been supply issues related to the capacitors and motherboards, and always overnighted new ones out.
Should Dell have been more careful about testing it's supplies? Yes.
Should Dell have been more proactive in replacing known faulty systems? Maybe.
Was Dell negligent or unresponsive towards it's customers? No.
This lawsuit is yet another waste of time. The Market has already punished Dell for it's failures by stripping them of a large portion of their market share. No need for the legal system to get involved. That's just kicking Dell when they are down.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
But if you order Platinum support, it will always be FANTASTICO! (The extra O only comes with Platinum.)
Its Dells fault, sure, but they got this wall between the Sales rep's and the tech support for a reason. I don't think there is one vendor out there that has ever had competent sales staff.
A Sales rep would send us out to "check customers system because its broken" with no parts on a same day call. We would show up and find either the issue has been fixed or we need one simple part that we have to wait 2 hours to get there. Hell, I was even told by one customer that they go though the sales guy they have ALL the time so they don't have to "wait in the que" for tech support. Even though they paid out the nose for Gold 4 hour "We ship everything under the sun(tm)" phone support.
I think it changed around 2005 as we stopped getting allot of those sales dispatches. I just wish Dell had sales people who worked in the field a little bit first.
I remember a certain model of HP laptop from a few years back that had a bad overheating problem. It was due to a defect in the design of the product. HP did nothing to fix it. This isn't the only problem Dell has had either, they had a BTX style desktop that would lose it's ability to see the USB keyboard and mouse. All it would do is say it couldn't see the mouse or keyboard and to please press F1. Call Dell and they would cancel your warranty and basically tell you to go stuff it. Acer had an entire line of laptops that would stop turning on after about a year of use. I have a stack of them in the corner. The list goes on and on.
We've purchased probably 25 Dell e6500 laptops and 1/4 either ship with a bad #2 slot or develop the problem within months. I've spent enough time on chat with their support that I have a written-out description that answers every damn question they ask in advance so we can just cut to the chase and they replace the motherboard. Solid machines otherwise, and this HAS to be a known manufacturing/component problem.
We had a lot of these GX270 machines, all with bad capacitors, and every single one of them died. System complains about overtermperature, but it's really the power supply failing. Dell replaced all the motherboards, and they've all been fine since.
This is also not new news, just seems that some documents in the case have been unsealed.
Do you run your hard drive with a write block on it?
If data is corrupted in memory or on the drive controller, you're going to end up with corrupt data written to the drive.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I work in computer repair and can tell you this sort of thing is nothing new.
Yep, that is old news. Some years it is impossible to buy a machine from Dell without MS Windows. That's not a new problem, even if MS Vista, MS Vista7, and MS Vista8 make nasty old XP and XP SP2 look less bad by comparison. Selling defective systems has been going on for years with full knowledge of the management. Only occasionally is it possible to get decent desktops or decent servers from them. To Dell's credit, they are making more of an effort with the systems at the moment, but it's still far from 100%.
As countSudoku() posts, Dell's probably going to be extra careful with hardware for the next short while and the quality will improve for at least a while. If it's possible to take advantage of that extra caution and if you were going to purchase soon anyway, it might be possible to score better than usual machines.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Capacitors? I thought the faulty component was the Operating System.
We use to be exclusively Dell for just about everything: 1U/2U servers, desktops, laptops, and even LCDs. In the last 18 months, it's been so bad dealing with Dell that we're looking at other manufacturers for our next upgrade cycle.
Here's the quick list of problems we've encountered in the last 18 months:
1) Vostro V13 internal cracked LCD. Caused by hinges that were too tight.
2) H700/H800 PERC RAID controller on R710 servers will only work on Dell certified hard drives. Prices are $299 per 500GB hard drives (that's down from $399 initial quoted price). We couldn't even use the Seagate ES series drive in the servers, the H700 controller is coded to accept "certified" drives. We were not told about this during the server ordering process or in any documentation. We bought 3 of these servers, we were looking to getting 10 but now we'll use someone else for the next 7 servers. Previously, the Dell servers can use any hard drives, we had the PowerEdge 1950 and 1950III series.
3) XPS M1330 laptop chipset failure.
5) DVD/Blu-ray drive failure on less than 6 months ago XPS system.
5) Customer service while not great before is actually worse now than my personal experience with HP. We're talking almost cheapie computer manufacturer service level here. And we're a business customer. I can't imagine how poor the regular home consumer are treated by Dell.
I remember this problem very well. As I had heard - Someone working for a electronics component factory in asia had defected to the competition with the formula for the capacitors. Unknown to the defector one key ingredient was left out of the list that he was privy too.
So, The competition ended up flooding the market with bad caps. I experienced this on a Gigabyte motherboard. Every cap located near the processor on the board had swollen or leaked. Companies should learn a good lesson on how to handle such problems by being truthful. "Hey, this is what happened and we are doing this to try and correct the issue". However, Companies like to cover things up and wait it out in hopes that time will hide their poor customer relations (comcast comes to mind). By being truthful to its customers it would actually foster an atmosphere of honesty instead of distrust. If your a company and you are having a problem then just admit your mistake and do your best to support your customer. The alternative will be more expensive and last alot longer as it grinds thru the courts and creates years damage to their reputations.
Solution... build your own PCs. You get much higher quality components if you buy decent brands.
If you buy Gigabyte "UltraDurable" branded motherboards, they contain solid capacitors which can't leak or burst. They also have an entire spare BIOS which is handy if you screw up the main one during a BIOS update. After a spate of capacitor problems on motherboards, power supplies and graphics cards, they're now the only board I'll buy.
in other news - spit is wet.
I've seen motherboards with failed capacitors which were made prior to 2003. I didn't see a lot of failures in new machines, but more like once the machine was a couple of years old (and these were mostly low end systems, so it was easier to just replace the entire computer with another basic model).
Sent from my iPhone
A few years ago, my Dell Dimension 4700 died. To be more specific, the power supply committed a murder/suicide with the hard drive. When I started investigating the problem, I found that it was pretty common with that model, and was caused by the fact that the main chassis fan was installed backwards about half the time. For any of you who don't know, what this meant is that air was flowing over the hottest component (the CPU), then getting sucked out by the power supply's fan, and then getting sucked right back into the case again by the main fan. Naturally, I complained; because even though my computer was out of warranty, this was clearly Dell's mistake and they should replace the parts they damaged. Well, first they lied, claiming the fan works fine backwards; fortunately I know better. Then they tried to give me the run around, asking me to send them the evidence (aka broken power supply). Finally, after threatening a class action suit and asking to speak to the legal department, I managed to get a support person to admit that it was an error, and they replaced the faulty parts. What really bothers me about the whole sordid affair is that this was a minor problem that Dell could have fixed almost FOR FREE, just by telling people to reverse the fan. No replacement parts necessary or anything. Instead, they decided to screw over their customers.
I work in a french college, and a two co-workers (who had ordered more than a hundred of those faulty PCs) had a hard time convincing their bosses that it was Dell's fault when the desktops suddenly started to go down one after the other. The common reaction was along the lines of "well if ALL of these computers were at fault, obviously there would be some media coverage about it". Also, there's no such thing as "class action lawsuit" here in France so the college would have had to build its own legal case, which was not an option against such a company. There was immediate need to replace the broken desktops, but Dell also delivered broken motherboards as a replacement. Kudos to the Dell commercials / techs, which were, then, VERY effective defending the "uncertainty" line depicted by TFA.
Jicehix
The article claims that the evidence came from unsealed court exhibits and other court filings.
Nice troll bate.
Last year I ordered a Studio 15 from Dell and after waiting 45 days for it to come on the mail, its a DOA out of the box. The laptop boots but there is no video on the display. After calling tech support and going through the typical troubleshooting, they decided that the laptop was broken and I needed to take it to one of their repair centers to have it fixed... err... which I refused since I was paying for a new PC not a repaired one. After arguing with them for hours that day, I got the option of a new PC that would arrive at my house in about 45 days or a refund that would take 45 days to appear on my credit card, 45 days after they got it back on their hands. Very horrible customer support and customer satisfaction. I tried to file a complaint with their customer satisfaction department but they only told me "that's how we do things, there's nothing we can do about it". At least I got my money back, but have read of other people that haven't had such luck.
You're right, I bought my Dell and had my tech friend come out and put this "Ubuntu" stuff on it. I told him I wasn't in to Pokemon.
"Farmers are to busy for war."
Forgot who quoted it, but I think it applies :P
To start with, it was Nichicon's problem. By covering it up as they did, Dell made it their problem. That was a poor choice. Sooner or later, Dell would have to come clean. Why not take the high road from the start? Had they done so, this would have sucked less.
This demonstrates the extent to which US companies are at the mercy of asian component suppliers. Certainly, former domestic component vendors had design flaws or manufacturing flaws in their products from time to time. But they were here and could be dealt with easily. If needed, they could be audited. If worse came to worst, they could be sued in this country. If you get bad parts from a low cost producer on the other side of the world, it's not so easy to work with or audit your vendor. Nor is it easy to collect damages in court.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
You can always revoke the charter if you need to.
Company can't operate, stock goes to zero, dead. Stockholders would think twice about 'risky behaviours' if it meant their stock could turn to worthless paper overnight.
My corp was pure HP. When Dells started showing up from the merged companies I put a few out. It got so bad with those machines I told my regional manager I wouldn't take them anymore. He told me I didn't have a choice. He shipped me a dozen old ones out of a closed office in S.Dakota and I warehoused the whole skid. Told him he can have them back whenever he wants. When they closed down my plant and shifted me over to another location I was shocked to find the whole plant filled with Optiplexes. The outgoing plant-IT person told me "yeah, I had some problems, but Dell would just replace the boards so it's okay." I went through his records and it was over one hundred PCs in two years. About one each week!
One year and four months later there are only fifteen Dells left in the plant. I've managed to eradicate nearly every one by carefully cascading HPs as they become available. Last month my company announced they would begin using a new PC vendor.
You guessed it -- Dell.
I just want to cry.
People have been looking at me like I grew a second head for years now when I told them at my previous job we were experiencing 50% or worse DOAs on Dell systems. They were mostly GX270s! It happened to other people! I'm not crazy! HAHAHAHA!
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
It seems that warranties these days aren't so much a "we're going to sell you a great product, so good we guarantee it"; but rather, "we are going to make components so sh**ty that we can actually make money on them even after sending out new sh**ty components to replace the potential broken ones". The whole "we'll send you parts but not cover labour" deal hints at this.
My friend tried to install Windows in my PC, I told him it liked its privacy.
which is totally what she said
We have four of these affected machines left. Two of them died weeks apart ~7 months out of warranty. Dell said SOL, no replacement. Has anyone had luck getting them to replace these faulty motherboards out of warranty?
That was why?
I didn't notice the fan...
I DID make dell send me 250 spare psu's though.
You won't believe how much thought goes into pricing components for Dell's motherboards. The engineers and marketing folks can spend weeks arguing over fraction of pennies for components but no one ever seems to think about how much it will cost to replace the motherboard when a capacitor that marketing saved $0.0001 on blows up or what it will cost in good will and customer relations. Michael will have to look for another ATT emeritus ecxec who won an award for Six Sigma to come lend his name to ANOTHER patented Dell "Quality First" push. And this is the premium corporate line of computers. Imagine what the crappy commodity computers are like.
I'm not a fan of Dell at all (don't even get me started). This gives me another reason - not because they have had a parts problem (ask me how many power supplies I've replaced in HP DC7900's), but because allegedly they've knowingly shipped bad product. It's one thing to discover a flaw and have to fix it, and quite another thing to intentionally continue to ship bad/defective products when you know it'll fail.
I wish every Dell Vice President knew Dell had people out in the field. You'd be surprised how many don't know that.
"....because the Power Supply's fan was reversed; instead of pulling hot air out, it forced hot air into the case."
Wait....somethings wrong there. If the air inside is hot, then the air outside must be cold. If you reverse the fan, it would suck in cold air, not hot.
Anyway, was your point that it would have no fans sucking out air, thereby creating positive air pressure instead of negative?
Motherboards leaking fluid from capacitors and catching on fire can cause data loss.
Capacitor_plague
How they handled it is no surprise, it's all about making the bux. Just ask HP how to keep the dough rolling in a crisis... at the customers' expense, of course.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
Every speech Michael has ever given touts "Dell Direct" as the reason this could never happen. "We have control over what goes into our machines, we designed them." "We have control over the supply chain." "We know from our service calls when a problem occurs." "We can turn on a dime if a problem occurs." "Just in time inventory means that if the supply stream is polluted, we can change to one that isn't."
We had hundreds of GX150's with exploding capacitors, and that was never a model that was recalled due to faulty capacitors.
GX520's have power supply issues, out of 300 we ended up replacing every single one at least once, the replacements weren't any better. After the warranty went out we now have dozens of them with faulty power supplies which cost close to $100 to replace each. Same with GX280's. Never any recall on either of those models. Currently running Optiplex 755, 760 and 780's. They are all almost exactly the same hardware, but some improvements, like fans on the hard drives which was another huge failure on the 520. They have a fan that sucks air in over the CPU, heats up, and where does it go? Onto the hard drive. I'm sure they thought they were cooling the hard drive, but not with the exhaust from the CPU.
Basically, I hate small form factor cases. They cram so much into a small case that is almost completely proprietary and never cools enough. Same story with our Compaqs and Gateway SFF pc's. If a part goes bad other than RAM or Hard Drive, it's going to be expensive.
Identity wipe? They already tried that by calling themselves "Beyond Petroleum" a couple years ago.
The problems affecting the Dell computers stemmed from an industrywide encounter with bad capacitors produced by Asian PC component suppliers.
I still don't get why you would bother with these calculations. Why bother with a recall at all? If you've got faulty flux capacitors, just go back in time and fix the bad capacitors. Problem solved. Surely, the price of a DeLorean is cheaper than a recall?
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
Dell: Dude, you're getting a Dell!
Customer: Shit!
DUH! They sell PCs with Windows...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
This was my experience as well. I buy probably an average of 30 Dell PCs a year, and had about 5 that had bad capacitors in them. The first one was a little tough to figure out, but once you knew what to look for, it was easy to determine if that was the problem or not. If I called tech support (the US one for Corporate, not the call center in India for home) and mentioned "bulging capacitors", they would skip right ahead to the part where they next-day delivered me a new motherboard, and offered a tech to put it in (I declined as I can usually do it just as fast anyway). I even had one that was 7 months out of warranty that they replaced with zero hassle when I told them what the problem was. Say what you want about Dell's products, but their customer support has always been top notch in my experience. And I deal with their tech support about once every 6 weeks or so for the past 10 years.
"But this one goes to 11!"
instead of pulling hot air out, it forced hot air into the case
Vapor-hardware ?
It wasn't just 270's and 280's. I've seen at least 3 GX620's with bad caps and one 745 with bad caps. Ah the tickets "User calling in with amber power light. No POST"
If I called tech support (the US one for Corporate, not the call center in India for home)
Say what you want about Dell's products, but their customer support has always been top notch in my experience. And I deal with their tech support about once every 6 weeks or so for the past 10 years.
Their corporate support is great. Their home support... no so much. :(
A former Dell M1710 laptop owner.
"The future can only affect the present if there is room to write its influence off as a mistake." - Yakir Aharonov
Badcaps.net
I had to replace 4 sets on some out of warranty 270s. Those machines were just too nice to scrap. Their form factor, combined with their ability to mount to the back of the Dell LCDs were real nice.
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
BP is a bad example for making your point with, since we've seen Exxon go from the Valdez spill to the most profitable company in the history of the planet over the last 20 years.
Plenty of companies cover things up, and either get away scott free, or get away with a small fine (compared to the crime, anyway).
Yep, I know, I had a lot of rejected slashdot submissions on this and a thread on Ars Technica on this too. This quarterly earnings game NEEDS to die.
This isn't about punishment, it's about compensation for shitty hardware that clients paid fucking money for.
I had to replace the caps in a friend's 2003 iMac last year. Cost only $30 or so (except for my time) and works great now.
My one capacitor failure event killed everything (except the ancient modem that had no reason to be in the system at the time - go figure). Went out to a movie one night, came back to a really nasty, acrid smell in the room. Opened up the computer, and discovered where the magic smoke had escaped from - one of the capacitors had literally exploded (there were little chunks all over the inside of the computer, along with some scorch marks).
I'm sure the data was probably still intact on the hard drive platters, but nothing on there was worth the expense of recovery. So yes, bad capacitors can definitely result in loss of data (although this particular failure mode was not consistent with the widespread problems in 2003-2005).
The company I work for had hundreds of the affected GX270's deployed at remote sites, and they were all supplied from Japan. This meant you couldn't get any support at all until you had the service tag transferred to the new country you were in. At the peak of the bad cap problem with the GX270's Dell would really drag their feet transferring the tag so they didn't have to deal with supplying the motherboard. I must have spoken to several Dell engineers who didn't get the memo about keeping their mouths shut about the bad caps because most I spoke to knew full well what what going on.
I got two 270s at an employee firesale in 2009. two months after paying two hundred for each of them, they both died. bad motherboard, capacitors suspected. it looked like a good deal, and only made based on my perception that dell made workhorses. oh well...
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
Topcoder was joking, son!
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
our library had about a hundred 270s, and yeah, they did drop like flies. But I'm pretty sure Dell fessed up to the problem and sent some techs with boxes of capacitors to replace all the originals, or could be they just swapped mobos. But I'm sure they admitted the problem, really no way they could deny it with the quantity we had.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Does, "Dell Selling Faulty PCs," fall into the realm of 'News' or 'History'?
Can u post a good replacement motherboard that's on the market today (cheap) that will cost the least to upgrade our dead optiplexes? i considered ordering just the caps, but that's a bit over my head replacing all of those. i just want to use the boxes to run some linux servers...thx!
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
Awesome comment. Any tech company with multiple products just has to produce a new product that gets more 5 stars than any other on newegg, Amazon, or the equivalent on $REVIEW_SITE, and the customers will be flocking back again. I'm trying to think of an example of a company that really relies on trust, and that cannot afford to screw up to the same extent. At first I thought - anything that will severely screw over people in the event of failure. Aircraft manufacturers and banks come to mind. NASA. Civil engineers. But then, it all comes back to the Fight Club equation - compare the cost of the screwup to the ability of the company/person to survive the screwup. The only people and organizations who can't afford to screw up are those who will be destroyed by the consequences of the failure. These are individuals, small companies with all their eggs in one basket. If you are a big conglomerate with lots of different products, you can afford to have a dud now and then.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Computer manufacturers have been doing this for years. I bought a HP Pavilion 8750C back in 2000. The thing would run fine for a couple weeks, and then freeze 10 times in a single afternoon. It drove me nuts... I tried replacing half the hardware, upgrading drivers, bois, etc - no help. I tried doing a clean install of Windows numerous times - 98, 2000, XP, even ME - same problem. Tried disabling the on-board video crap and installing a separate Video Card. Still nothing.
In 2003 I couldn't take it anymore, and built a replacement machine. About that time I ran across a thread on a forum like this one. Turns out many of the 8750C's had a motherboard that was compatible with Intel Celeron processors. My HP had shipped with a regular P3. So I picked up a cheap Celeron processor, dropped it in, gave the machine to my brother and it never had another problem.
HP must have shipped thousands of PC's with processors that were incompatible with the motherboards. I haven't bought anything from HP since, and doubt I ever will. I still can't believe there wasn't a class action lawsuit for that sort of thing.
My friend tried to act like an operating system was a religion or lifestyle, I told him he was an idiot.
"But this one goes to 11!"
BAH HA HA HA HA HA HA hahahahaha
GASP Stop it can't breathe.....
BAH HA HA HA HA HA HA hahahahaha
Someone thinks Dell honors their support contracts.
HEY GUYS! He actually thinks Dell honors their support contracts!
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!
F - It is much cheaper to simply lie copiously through advertising and PR to generate that goodwill. After all, it isn't about the truth, but perception. Perceptions can be bought.
Yep I know. It is not what I consider PR 2.0 compliant, but...
I mean, it is part of what I call "legacy" PR which I consider depreciated and not recommended, in contrast with PR 2.0.
Bought a Samsung LCD HD TV a few years ago from Best Buy (hey, they price matched!). Luckily, I also bought the extended warranty. LCD TV started to crap out at about the 3yr mark. Geek Squad guy came out yesterday, popped off the back. Bam, 4 bad caps!
Interesting tidbit was that Geek Squad replaced the bad caps with better quality caps. Repair guy claimed the original caps were rated for 10V and he replaced them with 25V. According to repair guy, the 10V caps regularly fail and that the problem is not limited to Samsung.
Probably not news to many, but ... It's pretty clear. Laptop, LCD TV, other manufacturers cheap out on the device components, which leads to failure in an unacceptably short period of time. This requires that consumers purchase expensive extended warranty plans or resign themselves to replace every few years. Shady man. Should be a special, dedicated level in Hell for these dishonest electronic device manufacturers.
I can answer this one.
Jack Shit.
The BP that sells petrol is a different entity to the BP that pulls oil out of the ground which is a different entity to the BP that turns oil into Petrol.
The BP that pulls oil out of the ground sells that oil on the open market, it doesn't expressly go to BP refineries to be sold in BP petrol stations. The oil that goes to BP refineries comes from BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Saudi Aramco, Chevron Texaco and anyone else in the oil extraction game. This petroleum is also sold on the open market so a Esso petrol station will be selling BP as well as Shell and Chevron petrol.
Besides, if you want to know who is really to blame for the gulf disaster you need only look for the nearest mirror. Unquenchable thirst for oil combined with unreasonable demand for low prices caused this. If you want to help, suspend the Jones act as there are companies in Europe and the Middle East who are experts at dealing with these kinds of problems who at the moment cannot do a damn thing because of politics.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Yeah, I have been paying attention in the last decade. But my personal experience and memory currently is approaching a half century. What happens in a decade means Jack Shit. I've seen companies come and go. The ones that have staying power don't pull this shit. If they are lucky they get a goodbye wave as they fail and disappear (or get purchased). Crappy companies don't last. Nuff said.
In ten years, Dell will still be around but your memory of this incident won't be. You will most likely be buying Dell again.
No I won't. Failure is terminal and my memory is long. Maxis fucked me over in the early 90's and I never bought another Sim game again. Ever. It's not that hard to avoid products from a particular company, really. Since we have something that resembles a free market, even if distorted, alternatives are available. Thank goodness for that. Dell is dead to me. End of story. That's how companies fail, because I'm not alone.
They don't remember the fact that some big faceless corporation screwed them over, that is a non event because it happens all the time.
That really is the problem. The consumer regularly has to choose between a poke in the eye or a kick to the shin.
Take BP for example, do we boycott them by taking our business to the despoilers of the Alaskan wilderness, the destroyers of the environment in Nigeria or the controversial government of Venezuela?
In electronics, there's so much re-branding and market segmentation you can't really know exactly who made what any more.
As several folks here noted, the capacitor issue impacted lots of hardware manufacturers not just us. Nichicon capacitors were used by Dell suppliers at certain times from 2003 to 2005.
Since then, Dell worked with customers to address their issues, extended the warranties on all OptiPlex motherboards to January 2008 in order to address the Nichicon capacitor problem.
Thanks,
LionelatDell
I Posted a story on this two years ago The link to my original post on Slashdot http://slashdot.org/~TiPros
Dell caught selling faulty PCs? News is that people are surprised.
Maybe Dell should shut the company down and give the money back to the shareholders (Dell: Apple should close up shop, Oct 6 1997)
Mod me down as flamebait, I don't care. After 13 years keeping that bottled up, it felt sooo good.
I noticed 2 things in this thread:
1. Several people got candid answers from Dell, and several got the run around.
2. The ones that got the run around were the ones that spoke to India.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The early ATX spec had the power supply fan blowing inwards, or in other words the air would be heated by the power supply before being blown across the CPU, making sure it was good and hot before getting to the harddrives. I remember taking apart my K6 system back in the day to reverse the direction of the fan, which made a dramatic difference in how hot the system ran. Though I think the GX150 came well after the ATX spec was changed to allow either direction.
At my company we have GX260, GX270, GX280, GX620, Opti745, Opti755 and now Opti780's.
All the 270's have had the boards replaced. All of our 280's have had the boards replaced. We are now in the process of replacing the boards on the 620's and 745's. The same issue amongst them all? Swollen/leaking caps.
On top of all this, 80% or more of the batteries on our Latitude D620/D630's go bad in less than 12 months. We have been replacing them at a steady rate. Its pathetic.
Why my employer continues to purchase Dell is beyond me. They are suckered in by Dell's low upfront costs and never seem to remember the long term costs that will be incurred by going with Dell yet again.
From what I can tell, this seems to be pretty unlikely.
My experience is strictly anecdotal, but I see a lot of machines with bad caps in my line of work. Having to replace half a dozen caps on a motherboard is rather common where I work.
Most of the time, the system appears to be fine afterwards.
It's amazing how much abuse a computer can take.
Also, bad caps aren't limited to mainboards. LCD displays that randomly shut off often have bad caps in them. The capacitors are cheap, and replacing them is pretty easy, if you can use a soldering iron. ;)
Every firm gets screwed by its component suppliers at some point (bulging caps, dodgy hard disk etc). I remember some Compaq Deskpros that were one of our 3 standard desktop models - we had thousands of them. At one piont we had failures of every single one we bought in a 6 month period due to faulty hard disks. Turned out to be a Seagate manufacturing problem, but Compaq still sent an engineer to site ONE AT A TIME to get them swapped out.
There's three scenarios here, in order of unpleasantness: 1) Dell didn't know about the problem until the calls started coming in, 2) Dell knew it had shipped a dodgy batch but figured they'd fix them one at a time to save face/costs, and 3) they knew that they were continuing to ship a product with a defect.
Well I guess we should just all use Windows then, because obviously there aren't any other reasons for disliking it other than religious fervour or because its ugly, clunky interface doesn't fit with our lifestyles..
which is totally what she said
That's just kicking Dell when they are down.
That's just trying to recoup some of the cost of failed computers!
Hello, Day Old News This is Slashdot calling, we'd like to cancel our subscription. From now on, we'll be giving all our business to Behind the Times.
Exactly HOW is this news? Anyone with a lick of tech savvy knew about this years ago, even when the entire computer industry denied there was a batch of bad korean caps floating around.
Informative link: www.badcaps.net
Use whatever you want, but don't pretend it is anything more than just lines of code. In the end it really doesn't matter.
"But this one goes to 11!"
That's another issue I have at Dell, they have like 20 Vice Presidents. I maybe I am exaggerating, but I had yet to talk or get an email from the same one in a row. Either they keep moving around in the company or none of them hang around for longer than a year.
Its like Vice President is now just resume fodder.
Sure, nothing really matters *shrug*
But if you're going to be living anyway, then why not try to enjoy it? Why not use the OS that you find most convenient/pretty/speedy/whatever-you-want?
Software is "just" lines of code in the same way that we're just a collection of atoms, food is just fuel for your body (this is actually often how I think of food, whereas most people try to make it into some kind of art or pleasure), cars and motorbikes are just a way to get from A to B, poetry is just a bunch of words, music is just a collection of noises, love is just chemicals, etc etc.
You can think of the world from a completely emotionless point of view if you want, but you're just being a dick when you try to make life that boring for everyone else. I think Apple fanboys are kind of pathetic for being so enthralled by Apple products and making excuses for them all the time, but my flatmate is one of those guys and I realised I might as well let him live in his little fantasy world where the iPad is better than a netbook, instead of killing his buzz as I used to do.
which is totally what she said
I wish there were enough people like you to make a difference, I really do.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
10 years ago we got in a batch of 250 desktops. Every last one failed either out of the box or within one week.
It isn't about not enjoying life, it is about not getting so wrapped up in things that don't really matter. Like what OS you prefer. Like you said about your flat mate - let anyone use what they prefer becasue life is too short and too full of other activities that interest me more than arguing about which OS is "better". The operating system that is "better" is the one you prefer to use. I am not endorsing any particular OS, and I don't think people should act like it is a great affront to their personality if everybody else doesn't think the OS you prefer is "the best". Basically I think we have the same point of view on this, not sure why you think I am endorsing Windows, not enjoying life, or whatever. I wasn't saying that the OS you choose doesn't matter, I was saying arguing about which is superior doesn't matter.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Me too, brother, me too.
Someday we will be able to kill a company utterly. Take it's assets, jail the top 10 percent and leave the rest out of work and off the dole. If murder is involved we get to watch a mass execution of the top ten percent of the company.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Disclosure: I once worked for Dell (briefly), right around the time we learned about the faulty capacitors in GX270 boards. I frankly don't give a crap about the company, I just like their prosumer LCDs.
So Dell found out about the flaky capacitors, right around the same time everyone else noticed motherboards were going "POP-SSsssss..." and dying. It's not Dell's fault that they were sold shitty caps, every other large manufacturer was duped just the same. I also don't think Dell was in the wrong for being cautious about disclosure, because it does indeed depend on how hard you push your PC. Some people still use their "faulty" eight-year-old GX270 without issue to this day; others had them fail within months. It would have been financially irresponsible to replace every single GX270, so we waited for people to call us, and they did. I, for one, was very quick about dispatching new GX270 boards, and with my influential position I encouraged the other 200 techs at our site to do the same. No beating around the bush, no idiotic mock-troubleshooting, even if the warranty had lapsed just swap the board and get on with it. A few weeks later we learned my proactive replacement had become the official policy, as it is the only honest and respectable thing to do.
Dell did right, in my opinion. What do you think Asus, Gigabyte or MSI would do if you reported bad caps, six months after your warranty lapsed ? They'd ship your board back, unrepaired, and charge you for shipping + a diagnostic fee, effectively saying "Our bad, but fuck you anyway".
-Billco, Fnarg.com
This issue affected so many different manufacturers. For example, the Apple iMac G5 was a big problem with bad caps. Also lots of LCD monitor manufacturers have failing backlight inverters due to the same issue. Also plenty of motherboards manufactured by Intel that went into HP, Gateway, and others all had the same problem. Sure, Dell did what they had to do because they couldn't get any good caps anywhere and the only other choice would have been to just shut down the company. My company buys lots of Dell products and they are always very quick to get problems resolved, usually overnighting us a part.
Absolutely correct.... Even Apple suffered from the issue. Revision "A" iMac G5 logic boards often died off from the capacitor leakage issue, and though it wasn't hugely publicized, Apple did make them right, even if they were a little bit past their warranty period, with a rev "B" replacement board that fixed them back up again.
Yeah... but honestly, part of the problem lies with the quality of workers the contractors hire, and that varies WILDLY.
I know a few people who worked as on-site service techs for Dell in the past, and the smarter/better ones usually were careful to avoid certain large contracting firms, and go with others instead, based simply on their pay-rates. Banctec, for example, was typically labeled "one of Dell's contractors to avoid" because they paid a lot worse than others.
The on-site workers were often made to look foolish too, simply because Dell's phone support people didn't order the correct repair parts for them. They'd arrive on site to replace a bad motherboard, only to find they were given one that didn't even fit the machine .... or worse yet, repeatedly sent out to replace a supposed bad video card, despite the on-site tech saying "Sorry... this was NOT a video card issue." and telling Dell what part WAS in fact needed instead.
Things like swapping out bad hard drives with slower or smaller replacements can and did/does happen .... but to be fair, sometimes that's also just an honest mix-up/mistake, because a given machine usually came with a certain configuration, but it changed over time. Dell was notorious for initially configuring with one drive size/speed, and then eventually bumping it up to something a little better as prices came down or availability of the original part became tighter. Then, when you call for a repair 2 or 3 years later? They just pull up a list of what Dell says those systems had in them, and it shows the initial config -- so that's what they replace it with, even if you bought yours later and it had a better drive.
It wasn't just 270's and 280's. I've seen at least 3 GX620's with bad caps and one 745 with bad caps. Ah the tickets "User calling in with amber power light. No POST"
Dell GTS tech (Twin Falls 2006-2009) here. Capacitors do die, occasionally, even good (or at least, "as good as cheapest maker makes") ones. The GX270/280 (and yes, very early 620s) just had specific capacitors from a specific supplier that were made incorrectly.
One story I heard was that the company that made them stole the process from another company, and screwed it up. Another telling of the story had something to do with the capacitors being made with incorrect/impure water.
Regardless, this was a lifetime ago as far as tech stuff goes. I'm very surprised that it's being brought back up now.
It seems like the MS troll patrol got to you first.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Because my life doesn't circle around my computer.
Thanks.
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
Where in my post did I suggest that mine does? I do love computing, but since leaving home and attending University, I've done very little programming outside of work and assignments.
Your life doesn't have to revolve around your computer to use the best OS for your needs any more than your life revolves around breakfast cereal just because you choose a flavour you like rather than taking the first one that comes to hand.
which is totally what she said
from italy...Emanuele
I tried a few notebook before to try dell (hp, toshiba), but after I tried their next businnes day repair plan I never changed.
Before I changed notebook every 6/9 month now I had a Vostro 1710 18 months old. When I had a problem with my notebook they resolve it in no time at all with machine stop of about 2 hour (the time to change the mainboard at my office).
I don't know what you are used to, but I'm very happy with dell. (they deliver me a notebook without windows too, and in italy this is very hard to do!)
Yes, a lifetime as far as tech stuff goes, but as far as legal action, it's the blink of an eye.
To err is human. To arr is pirate.
*air ball*
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I've called Dell about inferior replacements that showed up onsite, and Dell's policy was "they never advertised performance, only size and spin speed" and this part met those qualifications, and was the approved replacement part.
I've also seen many techs with the right part screw up rewiring the board, not being able to get USBs working again (or thinking they had a bad board when they simply failed to double check if the power connector was in the right pins). I've seen techs there to replace a hot spare kill a raid by pulling the wrong drive a dozen times, and I've seen techs who can't do anything beyond replacing the part (don't know how to even get in the BIOS to establish the new drive as a RAID member).
After market replacements are not covered under warranty, so I can't fault Dell for screwing that up. As far as replacing them with better at one time, then lesser (but still better than original) later, I've never seen that happen once. Per my understanding, Dell, as does HP and Acer, track each part by ID number in a build, not a default config of generic parts. They know exactly which part is in each machine, because almost everything they sell is custom order. I've even been told before that a part in my machine was not covered because it was not the part they had in their database, because a tech came out to replace 2 drives in 2 machines, and put the wrong one in each, swapping serial numbers.
Fact is, more often than not, and I've seen Dell contractors in 11 cities, the guys coming out are not even as good as BestBuy's in-store techs/geeks. They're generic, $12/hour part jockeys with little training and no knowledge who are on staff merely because that's all a company can afford to pay someone who gets $70 flat fee for an onsite job, and no one who knows more takes pay that low.
Real service? you find it at your local outlet or service center, not by rent-a-geeks. Apple's in store people ROCK. When IBM had shops around town, their people knew their stuff too. When I worked for a compaq certified server shop, we had to continually train people, even in high class products we didn't sell. I was in training 3-4 days a month just for compaq, another 2 for HP, Then DEC, NEC, Okidata, and more. If I wasn't inside a machine, I was inside a book, or a classroom, and failure to keep all our techs to that standard meant loss of our contract for repair. Then comes along some company faxing us offers to fix Dell stuff, flat rates, no materials, not even access to service manuals, at at lower pay and no travel expenses included. It was a joke, and we told all our customers that what you got when you bought Dell, a guy dispatched by a fax with no data...
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.