Dell Faces Renewed Scope on Class-Action Lawsuit

CommanderFrank

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Dell’s ongoing legal battles with consumer-rights firm Hagens Berman has been expanded to cover a myriad of failed hardware components on the Optiplex computer. The failure rate for this Dell model has been rated at 97% according to an internal document from Dell.

Documents from that case, unsealed in November of last year, showed that Dell not only knew of the problems, but had ranked customers by importance when deciding whether their faulty systems would be replaced.
 
dayum.. the company i work for has tons of dells. I'm typing on a optiplex 320 right now.
 
97%? Does that include all the replacements that also die from the poor design choices and subpar components? I worked for a massive company that had thousands of these, it wasn't a matter of IF but a matter of WHEN. It was a constant revolving door of replacement parts until the warranty would run out.

I'm curious to know if that particular business model was more profitable over offering quality machines. The whole, cheapest-components, worst-designs, and then replacing/repairing parts until the end of warranty has to add up on the expense side of things.
 
97%? Does that include all the replacements that also die from the poor design choices and subpar components? I worked for a massive company that had thousands of these, it wasn't a matter of IF but a matter of WHEN. It was a constant revolving door of replacement parts until the warranty would run out.

I'm curious to know if that particular business model was more profitable over offering quality machines. The whole, cheapest-components, worst-designs, and then replacing/repairing parts until the end of warranty has to add up on the expense side of things.

One poorly stolen electrolyte capacitor formula :p + bad SFF design.
 
I've seen several GX280s come into the shop for motherboard replacement, so this is not surprising.
 
It's pretty old models that are the target of this class action: certain GX270, SX270, and GX280 models made between 2003 and 2006. The law firm is claiming that 8 million of 11.8 million of those had defective motherboards. :eek:

LOL, I wonder who the moron was who decided to cover this up (too lazeh to read the unsealed documents). The bad capacitor problems were well known when the same problems started appearing on those Optiplex models. It wouldn't have been a secret once they started failing.
 
I had worked on a GX280 SFF a while back that would randomly not start up. He wanted that fixed and it upgraded/backed up/cleaned up a bit.

Added 2GB RAM, backed up all of their information to DVDs and then deleted his kids' profiles. During this process, I had one or two times where it made some funny sounds (like a dying pizzo speaker/buzzer) when turning on to a black screen.

I wasn't aware of all of the capacitor/mobo issues with these computers at the time, so I ended up testing the system with a full-size ATX power supply that I had known was working, and the computer started up perfectly every time after that. Diagnosed it with a bad power supply, swapped it for a replacement I bought off a server supply website, and gave his computer back after it worked great for me for a bit.

Worked great for him too for a few weeks until he started calling me saying the same thing started to happen. Too bad he didn't pay me enough the first time to bother calling him back a second time.

Probably was the caps on the mobo.. I imagine they were borderline when he brought it to me and weren't up to the task with a borderline power supply. Once the power supply was new and perfect again, it worked fine til the caps degraded further. 'tis my guess anyways, guess I'll never know as I now live 1200 miles away.
 
What do they mean by ranking customers importance ?
In the memo, the scope of the problem was recognized and the biggest customers were supposed to be helped first. That shouldn't be shocking.
 
hum, bought last dell product in 2002 after that i got about 7 handed down dell from verious family member because they couldn't repair it or didn't know what the problem was, i never looked at dell again and never bought another. Best part the 2002 dell is still running rock solid on P4 on CRT monitor.
 
I worked for a company that did onsite dell repair a few years back.

The models affected are ALL Optiplex SX and GX 260, 270, and 280 models.

I was working in Arizona at the time, and Dell ended up raplacing probably every single motherboard for every single one of those models I mentioned.

It got so bad at one point that Dell started doing a flat rate pay "contract" for businesses with large numbers of these machines. In other words, those jobs were off limits to the part timers like me, and were handled by the full time workers.

Don't even get me started on RAM and power supplies.

Over 50% of the time that Dell sent replacement RAM, it was faulty as well.

I only had a few issues with DOA power supplies, but there were a huge number of Dell computers that we replaced power supplies on.
 
in the past 1-2 years i have seen at least 3 optiplex systems from the same client that all have this same problem. the office has about 4-5 more of them. I don't even need to remove the side panel anymore to know that the caps around the pwms and the cpu socket area are toast. :rolleyes:
 
I remember when we got the GX270's in. We started having all kinds of weird problems, many of them manifesting as random weirdness. I eventually popped one of them open and saw the capacitors were bulging and leaking. We were a pretty large dell customer (about 15,000 users all with dell hardware), but we only had about 250 of these.

We had a certification level with dell where we could diagnose the problem and request defective hardware to be replaced. I remember submitting a request for 250 dell GX270 motherboards and they approvide and shipped them.

That was a long week...
 
Don't forget about these:
GX520 - bulging/leaking caps in the PSU
GX60 - bulging/leaking caps PSU and MB
 
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