Court Documents Shed New Light on Defective Dell PCs

From DailyTech: Dell has been haunted by issues and allegations surrounding the sale of defective OptiPlex Desktop PCs between 2003 and 2005. The systems sold were failing at very high rates and it was later determined that the reason for the wide spread failures was due to faulty capacitors used on the mainboards of the machines.

Dell was eventually sued by one of its customers, Advanced Internet Technologies (AIT). AIT purchased 2,000 of the machines and an internal audit the company conducted found that all of the machines were defective. AIT alleges that once it informed Dell of the issues, the company offered to replace mainboards. However, Dell continued to sell the defective computers.

The OptiPlex models that were affected included the GX280, GX270, and SX270. The big problem for Dell wasn't only the higher rate of failures, but allegations that the company pressured sales and support staff to not inform customers of the issue and to keep selling the machines knowing that they were faulty.

Documents related to the case were released last week by the Federal District court judge in North Carolina that is presiding over the case. The documents show that Dell replaced motherboards on 22% of the 21 million OptiPlex computers that were sold during the two-year time span. EWeek reports that Dell has already taken a $300 million charge for fixing and replacing the machines.

A Dell spokesperson said, "Dell actively investigated failures, we fixed computers that suffered a capacitor issue, and we extended the warranties on all the possibly affected motherboards."

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