Dell Accused of Shipping Desktops Known to be Faulty

[Alan22]

Raise of hands - how many of you here have had Dell systems with bad caps? Hmmmm, looks like everyone. Thanks to Dell for all the repair work. I'm happy to have the work, but unhappy that Dell quitely extended warranties to Jan. 2009 and never notified owners about the issue. About 2 weeks ago one of my clients called Dell to obtain a replacement motherboard for an optiplex sx270 and was quoted $315! That's no typo. $315 for a refurb motherboard w/ 90 day warranty. Friggin theives.

Here's the story about Dell. It's an interesting read:
Dell Accused of Shipping Desktops Known to be Faulty

 

[onetech4all]

Re:

Dell, is a pretty good company. At my full time job, we are only Dell and I see the Dimension 4400, 4500, 4550 going bad because of leaky capacitors. These are 4-5 years old computers. I recently bough a refurbished motherboard for $160 because the computer was a production computer running special hardware and it's a pain to reconfigure the software.

Nothing lasts forever, but Dell it's pretty tricky, just like HP when it comes to their motherboards and hardware. They are all the same. I find it very interesting when exactly after 3 years of hardware support, I have a power supply, motherboard or CD/DVD drive go bad.

 

[4ycr]

I know what you mean they quoted me £200 for a refurb board as well

 

[NYJimbo]

About 2 weeks ago one of my clients called Dell to obtain a replacement motherboard for an optiplex sx270 and was quoted $315! That's no typo. $315 for a refurb motherboard w/ 90 day warranty. Friggin theives.

Oh yeah, any mobo from Dell is insanely expensive. None of them are new, all are so called "refurbs" which just means they ripped them out of working laptops and cleaned them up. We had a guy with a XPS system that got a quote of something like $750 for the mobo and video card on a three year old machine.

 

[xxsilk109xx]

Ebay, lots cheaper, same thing....

 

[Galdorf]

Some of those models where given free 5 year extended warranties, i have been selling quite a few of those.
dell on the nichicon capacitor issue
There was already a class action lawsuit on this and the 5 year warranty was the result.

 

[ProTech Support]

Dell, is a pretty good company. At my full time job, we are only Dell and I see the Dimension 4400, 4500, 4550 going bad because of leaky capacitors. These are 4-5 years old computers. I recently bough a refurbished motherboard for $160 because the computer was a production computer running special hardware and it's a pain to reconfigure the software.

Nothing lasts forever, but Dell it's pretty tricky, just like HP when it comes to their motherboards and hardware. They are all the same. I find it very interesting when exactly after 3 years of hardware support, I have a power supply, motherboard or CD/DVD drive go bad.

At the company I work for at the moment, we have nothing but 4400,4500,4550, & GX260's. I originally started contracting for them about 4 years ago, and in this whole time I have never had one computer go on me. The worst thing I have had is bad RAM. In my opinion, that is pretty dam good run.

Could be that back in the day (these were purchased around 2003-2005) they were more solid, and now the newer models are starting to slip. To be honest, whenever we need an additional computer I order refurbished 4500's and just max out the RAM.

 

[Alan22]

My favorite workhorse computer is the Dell Dimension B110/3000. From 2004-2006 I sold and installed dozens of them and they're still going strong. I'm starting to see some hard drive failures, but that happen on any computer at any time. I've had just a handful of bad sticks of RAM and, recently, started replacing PSU's. These Dimensions are mostly used as point-of-sale systems and run 12+ hrs per day, 7 days a week. Some only turn off during power outages. I'd say that's strong testament to how well those systems perform.

As much as I love the Dimensions, I hate the Optiplex systems from the same time period, especially the sff systems such as the SX270 which can run incredibly hot. I've replaced blown exhaust fans, lots of ram, optical drives and, of course, motherboards/capacitors on the optiplex line. These are supposed to be better quality than the Dimension line. I think it's just the opposite.

 

[arrow_runner]

Haha. You guys should have seen some of the stuff HP sent me. I was responsible for about 40 SFF AMD 2500+ XP based HP towers. They ALL ended up having their boards replaced, some multiple times because of blown caps. And on more than one occasion we were sent boards with already blown caps or something else wrong with the board. We were sent one board that was worse than any we had ever seen!

I ended up documenting everything and getting the warranty extended on the models for another year after some talking with a rep. Don't even get me started on the bug zapper power supplies they had...

Point being, crap happens. With companies so big and a global supply chain so complex, stuff like this is bound to happen any of these big companies.