Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

Dell knowingly shipped millions of defective computers?

(1/4) > >>

mouser:
This is not cool -- looks like we are talking about millions of pcs that were defective.

Documents recently unsealed in a three-year-old lawsuit against Dell show that the company’s employees were actually aware that the computers were likely to break. Still, the employees tried to play down the problem to customers and allowed customers to rely on trouble-prone machines, putting their businesses at risk. Even the firm defending Dell in the lawsuit was affected when Dell balked at fixing 1,000 suspect computers, according to e-mail messages revealed in the dispute.

--- End quote ---


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/technology/29dell.html?_r=1





from http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/06/29/1618205/Dell-Selling-Faulty-PCs

mwb1100:
Yup, not cool.  I got bit by that problem on a couple of Dell 400SC machines: http://www.interslice.org/dell400sc/capacitors.htm

Aside from how Dell handled the problem (or rather, didn't), one of the worst aspects about the failures was that the symptoms were intermittent. As I mention on the above page, I spent a significant amount of time thinking that I had malware of some sort or a goofed up configuration causing the problems.

One interesting thing is that both my 400SC's had the problem with the capacitors but only one showed any instability. Surprisingly, the one that had capacitors that actually burst was the one that remained stable.  The machine that behaved poorly had caps that "only" bulged, but didn't actually burst.

zridling:
Gateway did the same thing for years in the early-mid-90s. Their feeling was, make the money on the sale and wait until the customer complained. Then make it so difficult for the customer to get it fixed that they would give up. As you can see, they eventually lost zillions.

parkint:
Yes. I got stung by Gateway in those days (a dozen machines that represented an entire company's computer assets) and, for that reason, I have NEVER purchased another thing from them.
It caused me many headaches and much embarrassment.

J-Mac:
I have one of their rotten XPS M-1310 notebooks; has the same overheating that some HP notebooks had. After ignoring the problem altogether for some time Dell finally released an update that "fixed" the GPU overheating issue... by forcing the fan to run overspeed 100% of the time. Grrr...

Never again, Dell.

They screwed me big time five years ago and I stopped buying Dells. Then I decided to "try" the M1310 because it was on sale for lower than any comparable notebook I could find. Duh (as I start beating my head on my desktop again, over and over!) Thought I would have learned. I have now.

Jim

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page