Friday, July 02, 2010

Time to Stop Buying Dell Computers

If these allegations are true then I might have bought my last Dell Computer.

Dell, along with many other manufacturers of PCs, used capacitors produced by Nichicon, a Japanese electronics giant. According to court documents [PDF] in the suit against Dell brought by a major customer, Nichicon sold faulty capacitors, a key motherboard component, that leaked and failed with alarming regularity -- and Dell knew it.

In his excellent piece in the New York Times this week, reporter Ashlee Vance refers to an internal study by Dell that predicted its Optiplex line of business computers containing Nichicon capacitors were expected to have a failure rate of 97 percent over three years.

If they went ahead and used these capacitors knowing full well that they would fail and then covered it up then they join Sony in my product dustbin. This is especially bad when it comes to a computer since I know how bad people take it when their computers die.

I have bought an HP Netbook and I am very much enjoying it so far. I was thinking of upgrading my desktop so I can take advantage of Virtualization Technology and I was looking at the Dells. I can now stop and look at the HPs and Acers now instead. I don't buy things from companies that attempt to defraud their customers.

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