A news story that originally broke in the NY Times, has the tech world of blogs buzzing about the possible failing of a one time giant company. While the law suit is over three years old and Dell has attempted to pass it off as “old news”. Recently, documents have been unsealed that disclose that Dell employee’s may have known about the faulty computers that were being shipped. Many of the computers where customers complained enough were fixed. However, it appears that Dell chose to use the same faulty motherboards to replace the old ones.
The math department at the University of Texas noticed many of the computers they were using were failing. Enough so, that they brought the complaint to Dell. Dell’s answer was that they had over taxed the computers by working them to hard on big math calculations. Meanwhile, back at the corporate headquarters there was talk of the possibility of these particular Optiplex models shipped between 2003 and 2005 having issues with bad capacitors, but only a small percentage of those shipped were suspected to fail. Private investigation and recent audits point to the fact the Dell may have miscalculated the percentage.
Adding gas to the fire, even the company that was hired to defend Dell in the lawsuit were using said machines. To their surprise, Dell even “balked” them when they enlightened the company that they may just have a real problem on their hands. Seriously though, over 11 million machine were said to have been shipped out during this time frame and at this point we may not be able to rely on Dell to tell us exactly how may of them were the faulty Optiplex model. A quick check over at the Dell web site shows that the Optiplex is the model the company suggests for business use. It may not be recommended for an accountant though.
Many of the unsealed documents and emails have brought forward the inner workings of a one time respected company, after reading some of the documents and memos…Dell may be a long time recovering their reputation.