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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."
"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
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?
From the article,
According to company memorandums and other documents recently unsealed in a civil case against Dell in Federal District Court in North Carolina, Dell appears to have suffered from the bad capacitors, made by a company called Nichicon, far more than its rivals. Internal documents show that Dell shipped at least 11.8 million computers from May 2003 to July 2005 that were at risk of failing because of the faulty components. These were Dell’s OptiPlex desktop computers — the company’s mainstream products sold to business and government customers.
So last week you bought three computers dated between May 2003 and July 2005? The suit names Optiplexes with bad capacitors and that's what you purchased last week? Or are you telling me that this continues to this day in 2010, seven years after it started?
You may have other problems than faulty computers -- like a faulty lie generator or even employment at Dell.
My work here is dung.
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.
Did they reimburse you for the lost productivity? No? Even after they knowingly sent you a faulty system, you're still willing to give them a free pass. You're free to bend over for whoever you like but I'll take my anger standing up, thanks.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
So... considering that bad boards were used to replace bad boards, how many of those GX270s are still around?
Your assumption is incorrect. They replaced the bad "boards" with boards that had good capacitors. We could tell whether a motherboard had been replaced by whether its caps in the GPU area were X-topped or K-topped. That visual indication was a big help when we decided to pressure Dell into sending us tons of motherboards for mass replacement before they went bad.
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
It's not an 'assumption' at all, if you had read the article, you'd know it was a confirmed practice, exposed during the legal proceedings described therein. Congratulations on being able to pressure Dell into doing what they should have for everybody, but don't be an asshole implying people are ignorant just because their experience differs slightly from yours. Anecdotal evidence only goes so far.
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
So you've resigned yourself that consumers just have to live with shockingly high premature failure rates? Good luck with that strategy. I'm going to continue only using vendors that supply products which have a decent chance of lasting a few years and when they do break don't suffer subsequent failures shortly afterward.
If you read more closely than I suspect you have, this thread is not about debating whether hardware failure is inevitable, its about whether Dell is doing their job of assuring reasonable quality and the ethics of their order fulfillment policies.
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.
I hate it when customers ask me to "reimburse you for the lost productivity" Its what lawsuits are for:P
Everyone makes mistakes, systems go down, things catch fire. Its why allot of companies that care about this don't do a single vendor. Why, even though they bought a million dollar EMC array, they have it backed up nightly with another million dollar tape robot.
Even at home, I make sure every computer I care about has a raid 1 array. There is nothing Dell, HP or even EMC can do when your drives fail. If you want to be reimbursed, you better be able to prove, in a court of law, that it was due to the incompetence of the Vendor.
Witch AIT did:)
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
<karma burn>
Is "loving too much" one of their problems? Caring about people to the point of losing self-efficacy? Working too hard and not spending enough "me" time getting to learn who the real Dell is, deep inside?
</karma burn>
My experience with them is just the opposite; I bought two Dimension 3000s and both had overheating problems (also well-documented on the internet including pictures of melted components and mobos, both acknowledged by Dell "off-the-record" by a phone rep). They tried everything possible to not fix the problem...by their own admission, their fanless CPU heatsink and externally-vented shroud scheme ("design" is too kind a word) was a failure, but they refused to do anything about it, and offered to send me new shrouds--parts that worked as designed and were not defective, per se. We played that game for months until the warranties expired and they refused to ackknowledge my existence anymore unless I bought an additional support package, even though the original overheating problem had not been resolved.
And that terminated, until the end of time, my dealings with Dell.
My debut novel AMITY now available: http://jeremydbrooks.c
Amen. Of course, it would be a lot easier if such a large fraction of our GDP weren't run by the mob. We've got hit-men (Military-Industrial complex), drug dealers (Big Pharma), torches (oil and chemical) and numbers-runners (finance).
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I fully agree.
If the US wants to view corporation as a living entity, they should have corporal punishment.
Baring that, I think fines should be levied agents a corporation in percentages instead of flat numbers. Fining BP 75 million is nothing. Fining them 20% of gross profit each year till the spill clears up? It will be done in a week.
Macs work by moving good karma around
- yeah, around and out of them. Macs work by rearranging the dark forces within them, that's closer to the truth.
You can't handle the truth.
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.
I wonder if BP's board of directors had similar thoughts about their CEO, Tony Hayward.
He won't act like an idiot again.
Okay this time we really mean it.
We directed him to not speak in public.
We've restricted him from public appearances.
Counting on corporate shame as a method for fixing behavior is ridiculous. There is no such thing as corporate shame.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
Actually, I doubt that they were using tantalum capacitors; they were aluminum electrolytic caps. Tantalum caps usually do not have a liquid inside and therefore do not leak, rather they explode.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.