Dell Employees Knew Its Computers Would Fail

Ha! Thought as much, we replaced our machines around that time moving from Fujitsu to Dell, around 30% of the machines Optiplex 270 were dead on arrival and most needed to be boxed up and sent to our MIS people at least once during it's life. The stupid thing is they still buy Dell laptops for the sales force, where as management get IBM.

I'm no Dell lover by any stretch of the imagination, but shouldn't at least some of the blame lie with the company who actually manufactured the motherboards in the first place?

I know a lot of these Dell machines use modified-Intel boards, and I've seen plenty of non-Dell built machines with blown capacitors. Intel 815, 845, 865, and 915-based boards all seem to share the same problem over time. I've yet to see any 945-based (or beyond) boards with failing capacitors, but time will tell I suppose.

I never did like the idea of a dell branded custom motherboard. I'll stick with trusted brands that use 100% japanese capacitors.

If dell wants some respect back they need to step up on their game.. in a major way. If not, someone will just take their place.

this is part of why we build our own computers with trusted manufacturers. Too many shady components to cut corners or to save them money...totally unacceptable...

It's not so much the fact they used the bad capacitors. It's that they recognized the problem and intentionally made efforts to conceal it. And worse, replaced bogus parts with more bogus parts and hoped the customers would simply give up.

This is almost like programming a machine to fail to induce customers to purchase faster to increase revenue. Shady shady. But at the Optiplex price point, you get what you pay for right? I mean if we can't build a quality machine at that price point, they can't either.

Hp d530's had this same issue.(and other models released around the same time) government and the general public may have sent these things back 3 or 4 times for bad caps...

They used cheap Taiwanese caps... Taiwanese caps aren't bad now but back then they were complete garbage and often out spec....

Building a shoddy system is one thing, as that can be fixed. Lying about it is something else. It would no doubt drag out in courts for years, but when all is said and done, I hope Dell takes it in the pants over this one.

Hp employee's also knew about the caps being worthless...

yep, my company sent back over 30 motherboard due to bad capacitors, dell always said " yeah we know this is a problem" but they always picked up the tab.

From a Quality Control stand point if you KNOWINGLY ship a defective product whether you produced the part or you purchase it as a sub-assembly it is COMPLETELY unacceptable to pass it along to the next stage in the process, especially the customer. Does the board manufacturer have responsibility? Sure, and Dell well have to work with them to resolve the current issues in the field, but Dell should take a hit for this for releasing bad product. Period.

heh iv fixed so many NEC Powermate systems with shoddy MSI motherboards with blown caps (solid caps! load of crap - all of them under the cpu cooler near the cpu socket) - CORE 2 DUO 7xxx SERIES MACHINES.

Dont ever tell me MSI is a good brand. EVER.

DELL HELL

They also had more recent issues with their optiplex 620 power supplies. Bad caps inside the power supplies caused over 150 of ours to fail out of the 200 we purchased. They never recalled them or even admitted to having a problem.

I dunno. Dell sells the computer as a complete package, so they should be responsible for their product. To the customer, it's irrelevant whether the hard drive fails or a capacitor blows. It's a fault with the Dell computer either way. If brakes started failing on a certain brand of cars, it would look very bad if they blamed whatever company they outsourced the manufacture of those components to.

I'm sure Dell knew how much they were paying for those mobos and how costs were kept down though they might have underestimated the consequences of this particular cost saving measure.

I remember about 9 years ago, we had almost the same problems with the IBM 6578 models, over time the capacitors would bulge and leak and all they did for us was extend warranties.

How many companies seriously build their own computers nowadays and dont outsource it and by doing so loosing a lot of the QA that self owned facilities offer...

someone did take dells place, acer is #2 now because dells quality went to hell. most motherboards in the world are built by the same companies: quanta, compal, wistron, inventec, . couple smaller companies, but a good % are made by those four. theyre just rebranded

This same issue occurred with Lenovo/IBM machines. Capacitors on the motherboards would end up failing. 2-3 years of use. In my company, we had 450 of a particular model and 250 of another, slightly older model. In each case we replaced each motherboard in those and most of the power supplies. IBM/Lenovo was very slow to react and played as if nothing was really wrong. We have since switched vendors, not so much from the failures as the stagnant responses from Lenovo.

I will never purchase a Lenovo product from this point on and will do everything I can to keep friends/relatives from buying that crap.

I repair computers for a living & agree that Dell should have recalled & replaced these. On a positive note almost all Dells I get now are due to viruses so the hardware quality seems to be pretty good now.

How exactly do you lose valuable data from a failed motherboard? I guess if you were in the middle of something when the motherboard failed or something, but you wouldn't be set back that far.

Dell has gotten better over the years with quality, i repair more emachines, gateways, Packard Bells and advent machines and self builds or small local PC company builds than i do Dell or HP!!

Its a pity they did not face the problem square on and get replacement Mobos made with the corrected Caps on to replace failures when they came in on warranty, That would have been enough to save face and gain reputation as an honest reputable dealer! They wouldnt have even had to do a recall, just issue warranty guidelines and ship correctly working units once the problem was discovered not continue shipping defective units.

My guess is that the Accounts Department did the calculations and found that doing so would break the company so they covered it up as best as possible.

Dell did extend the warranties on the Optiplex 270's motherboards up to until 2007 or 2008 and if you just called their support and they knew you had a 270 and told them your capacitors were leaking they would jsut ship you a new board free of charge even if the computer was out of its orignal warranty period.





I had this issue with the 620's aswell. I've never heard of dell coming out and saying there was a known issue though. Thanksfully we only had 4 of these though where I work and they were all still underwarranty. The powersupplies were definatley shotty in that model though.

Don't blame me, I'm just the middle man... BP approves of this logic! #bpcares

Back in those days, Asus, gigabyte and athers also produced boards with bad capacitors the good thing for them is that they do not issue 3 years waranty like Dell did at the time with Opltiplex systems so when the board died, the end user could only buy a new one and shut up.

Blame the MB manufacturer or where it was manufactured, just look to China. Dell knew they were crappy and used them anyway. Class Action on Dell.

I prefer Gigabyte MOBOs.

yep, i've replaced hundreds of mobos in GX270 as well. Current GX products though perform far better. Let's not forget that most of them are still new machines though...

Taiwanese companies are known for crappy and cheap products. The only reason they are around is because people won't pay Japanese prices. ASUS, Gigabyte and to some extend MSI are good as they are premium brands but HTC and other cheapo brands should be avoided.

Opss somebody forgot our beloved Foxconn being #1

I'm looking at an Optiplex GX620 right now with leaking capacitors. The motherboard is almost always the issue when we have a gX620 serviced here and I bet most of them have leaking capacitors.

I guess my father got lucky with his XPS that he got in 2005.

This is one of the funniest lines Ive heard in awhile: "The math department at the University of Texas reported to Dell that its machines were failing, and Dell told the school that the machines were overtaxed by all the difficult math calculations they were running. In actuality, the machines were built with bad capacitors that popped and leaked chemicals."