Dell Knowingly Sold 11.8 Million Computers with A 97% Failure Rate

[Poke]

I always do a custom build my home PC or order from someone that will let you really choose what you want.

Dell Knowingly Sold 11.8 Million Computers With a 97% Failure Rate

 

[mdram]

ditto, but most people have no clue and only know the name.

oh and ive seen good companies in the comp industry die due to bad purchasing. remember epox? very solid mobos, until they got a bad batch of caps. now they are outa business

 

[grydlok]

ditto, but most people have no clue and only know the name.

oh and ive seen good companies in the comp industry die due to bad purchasing. remember epox? very solid mobos, until they got a bad batch of caps. now they are outa business

Epox motherboards were crap, just like ECS

 

[avg1joe]

wikipedia "capacitor plague"

This is not solely a Dell problem although they seem to have gotten caught trying to cover it up. The article very briefly says that other companies had the same problem. I've seen it in gateway and emachines computers, and lcd monitors. I've seen many more dead emachines than dells. I would buy a dell. I would not buy an emachines.

Has anyone ever heard of a recall from any company due to bad caps?

I'm not sure that building your own rig really could avoid this problem. Motherboards were built with bad caps for a few years and no one realized it until much later. Can you look at a picture online and know that the electrolyte mixture in the caps is right? I have intel, msi, and imperial boards in my cellar with this problem.

 

[grydlok]

wikipedia "capacitor plague"

This is not solely a Dell problem although they seem to have gotten caught trying to cover it up. The article very briefly says that other companies had the same problem. I've seen it in gateway and emachines computers, and lcd monitors. I've seen many more dead emachines than dells. I would buy a dell. I would not buy an emachines.

Has anyone ever heard of a recall from any company due to bad caps?

I'm not sure that building your own rig really could avoid this problem. Motherboards were built with bad caps for a few years and no one realized it until much later. Can you look at a picture online and know that the electrolyte mixture in the caps is right? I have intel, msi, and imperial boards in my cellar with this problem.

Asus and Abit recalled some bad mobo's

 

[jayn_j]

This bad cap thing hit the entire industry hard. It was not just consumer companies trying to save a buck. The whole distribution chain for capacitors got polluted and I saw high failure rates in industrial and even aerospace products.

The last company I worked for had to recall an entire production run of parts for a commercial aircraft due to these capacitor issues.

I expect that as it hit, Dell was faced with shipping with a high failure rate or shutting down production. I also expect that HP will get tagged next for this.

 

[navychop]

Epox motherboards were crap, just like ECS

That has been my experience, too. I buy ASUS almost exclusively.

 

[Van]

Gigabyte had some bad ones as well.

 

[TheForce]

Glad my Dell was one of the 3%

 

[Stargazer]

Glad I went with a Sony again instead of a Dell.

 

[vurbano]

glad I build my own

 

[mike123abc]

DailyTech - Dell Responds to Suit, Says it Never Knowingly Shipped Faulty Computers

Dell claims that they did not know that the capacitors were faulty until after the boards had shipped and started to fail. They extended the warrantees and replaced all the ones that failed.

I would be more suspect of Dell if I did not know that it was a huge problem for multiple vendors and motherboard manufacturers.

 

[iceturkee]

mine was built in 2005 and although, it never failed....it has been a giant headache. i will never buy dell again.

 

[Claude Greiner]

I think I got a bad one from Dell during that timeframe.

Never bothered to waste my time to send it in under warranty, it was easier just to go out and buy a new PC.

I will say this, this was the last Dell PC I ever purchased.

If they want to ship faulty PC's thats fine, with me it costs them thousands of dollars in business because ever since all I buy is IBM and Lenovo products, and I have probably purchased 50+ computers for my business.

 

[Stargazer]

I don't see Dell shipping out computer that they know are bad because they know that it would give them bad name for doing that and have a cost to replace / fix them.

 

[avg1joe]

I'm googling companies as people are saying that they prefer brand X over Dell. I'm not finding anything to inspire confidence in those companies either. The problem appears very widespread around that time although it didn't always strike a company through its motherboards.

 

[meStevo]

I'd still buy dell if the deal was right. I build all of my computers usually, but have had many more dells in my life vs the competition combined with my only disappointments coming from crappy hardware vendors like ati. I believe every lcd in our house that isn't a samsung tv is a dell too... 6 of them at one point. Have an awesome 21 in. dell trinitron in the garage too.

Sent from my Droid using Tapatalk

 

[avg1joe]

A computer that works is a computer that works. I don't care much who made it. Three things I like about older Dells:

1)You can find the factory reinstallation xp disks cheap.

2)The automatic activation built into the disks when used with a dell bios. This saves me time and money.

3)They made all these computers with bad caps, which means I get them for cheap or free, replace the caps, and resell them for a significant profit.

The scariest part of all these stories was that dell was replacing the boards with another board that would go bad.

 

[sampatterson]

Dells at work, Macs at home. No issues with either.

 

[diogen]

1)You can find the factory reinstallation xp disks cheap.

Actually, just one disk will do them all.
Unless you jump multiple generations of chipsets, but even that can be cured with slipstreaming the new drivers...

It's even easier with Win7 where one image holds everything from Ultimate to Basic.

Diogen.