New
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That was an interesting read. It stinks!
Thanks for sharing.
First reported by the New York Times, the computers were sold in a two-year period from 2003 to 2005, and were sold to educational institutions, large companies such as Wal-Mart and Wells Fargo, organizations such as the Mayo Clinic, and others.
Read more at: Unsealed court documents reveal Dell knew it sold faulty computers | Tech Policy & Law News - Betanews
from betanews.com
These types of problems are standard for pretty much any mass produced computers. They all use the cheapest parts possible from the lowest bidders and then pass the savings along with the problems on to the customer. This is why I build my own machines.
yes very good read, Dell never accepted that there was an heat issue with the I5100 series laptops either ,leading to one or two websites setting up petitions and a blanket Email to send to Dell, all to no avail
It's a shame. I used to be a proud Dell customer, but hardware failures and now this have made me think of other companies to purchase from when buying new PCs.
With the couple of Dell's that I purchased for my own home use, Dimension 4550 and an 8400....they were solid and reliable machines. i usually opted for upgrades and got genuine sound blaster Audigy 2 cards, ATI Radeon 9700 Pro and X800XT video cards and my hard drives were always Seagates or Western Digitals. Processors were Intel Pentium 4's... (2.4Ghz and 3.2Ghz with HT).
Don't forget the more recent bout with the defective Nvidia laptop GPU's. I lost track of what may have finally happened with this issue regards to Dell, but at least HP (not sure about any of the others) did the right thing and extended the warranty on most of their laptops with this problem, unlike Dell who basically just issued a bios update,
http://en.community.dell.com/dell-bl...op-owners.aspx
that did nothing more than make the cooling fan run faster and at lower temperatures (probably in the hopes of prolonging the video cards from dying until after the warranty had expired).
We have about 25 of these Optiplex pc's at work. I've replaced failed capacitors on about 2/3rds of them so far. We're an electronics manufacturer so it was simply a matter of buying a couple hundred caps of the right value and reworking the pc's as the caps went funky over time.
Supposedly, the caps were overfilled with dielectric fluid. The caps swell and bulge and leak brown gunk.
That said, my personal Dimension E520 has been trouble free.
My Dimension 2400 has lasted a good number of years, but the screen of my Inspiron 600M laptop I bought in 2005 only lasted just 2 years and I had to get a new laptop. Found out later the 600M had screen issues.
On another note, we have hundreds of OptiPlex machines that had this very problem. Dell was very good about replacing every motherboard in every machine we had. Never told us no or gave us any trouble. On some machines they replace the motherboard twice. Many many times they replaced the motherboard even when the machine was out of warranty. Dell gets an A+ in our book.