In what I found to be an interesting read, Dell has responded on their blog, to the capacitor problem they had experienced in their OptiPlex computers. The company stated that this was an industry wide problem involving capacitors from one the leading suppliers for all computer companies. The faulty capacitors were made by Nichicon between 2003 to 2005, and not all computers that had the capacitors failed. It seems that according to Dell, it was an issue of how many of the faulty capacitors were used on a particular motherboard that determined how soon the board would fail;

Dell states these points:

This is an issue we addressed with customers some years ago. The Advanced Internet Technologies lawsuit is three years old and does not involve any current Dell products.

Dell did not knowingly ship faulty motherboards, and we worked directly with customers in situations where the issue occurred.

This was not a Dell-specific issue, but an industry-wide problem.

Dell extended the warranty for up to five years for customers who had affected machines.

This is not a safety issue.

The blog post goes on to state further evidence from Dell that they took the proper actions and repaired the faulty computers in a timely manner. But not everyone who read the blog post agreed:

The quote “Emphasize uncertainty” is the most troubling. Dell knew there was a problem and rather than be open and forthcoming about potential issues, they chose to leave their customers in the dark. It’s not like the failure rate was 5 or 10%, we’re talking about problems occurring in 97% of the Optiplex machines containing the effected capacitors over a 3 year time span. This number comes straight from a Dell study.

Another reader posted this comment:

Dell “addressed with customers” the problem?

It did not. I am sure there are many, many customers who had no idea there were any such problems until reading this article, or probably still do not know there were any problems. I had a desktop in the time period completely melt down due to overheating, never happened before on over a dozen Dell machines.

Never heard once about a recall, any faulty parts, or any steps I should have taken to fix it.

You can check out what Dell also had to say in their defense. I have no opinion whether good or bad about the situation since I personally had no issues with Dell systems failing. These machines were usually used by government and businesses.

Comments welcome.

Source – Dell Blog