OT: In Faulty-Computer Suit, Window to Dell Decline

[Stephen]

This is pretty much the norm across HP, Dell, Acer/Gateway, any of
this tier of vendor.

the 2 options i find is buying my own parts and building the machines,
however i cannot meet these prices (usually) for the bottom line, but i
rarely have issues with the parts i buy. (i thank 4 years in tech
support/R&D with an OEM white-box company for this)

however dell treats its optiplex lines very differently than its other lines
and they are built with a better standard of hardware. usually less flexible
but more reliable. in 120 machines i had one failure of a nic
port, which was replaced very easily (board swap).


On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 7:03 PM, Technomage <technomage.hawke at gmail.com>wrote:

>  Interestingly enough, one of my clients had a newer model dell (less than
> 3 years old) buy the farm as a result of bad caps
> (5 of them along the regulator strip on the motherboard had popped, one
> explosively so). I gave her my last remaining
> working older machine (and older AMD 3200+ 32 bit machine) that actually
> seemed to work *better* than the machine
> she originally brought to me.
>
> Unfortunately, the hardware failure also resulted in her OS (windows xp
> pro) having issues that took me multiple
> tries and finally a full blown re-install to get corrected (the last at my
> cost).
>
> The situation as reported in the news article is actually a lot more common
> than people are lead to believe. as companies try
> to maximize their bottom line, they tend to cut corners (like finding
> apparently cheaper vendors for some parts of their
> product line, etc). as stated, dell wasn't the only one to have these
> problems (caused in large part by financial pressure
> to get things done on the cheap).  I have at some point worked on many
> machines (and other pieces or hardware) produced by
> a variety or foreign or domestic firms where cheap caps were the primary
> cause of failure (computer PSU's being the most common
> among them).
>
> anyone here know how all this got started? a little piece of botched
> industrial espionage in Japan where a Taiwanese competitor
> tried to steal the formula for the electrolyte compound used in the
> production of capacitors. Only they got the incomplete formula
> missing the depolarizing agent (the chemical that prevents both
> electrolytic breakdown and oxidation of the metal strips used in
> such devices). the problem wasn't discovered until almost 2 years later
> when caps started exploding in cheap power supplies.
>
> here's a wiki on the article:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
>
> what is more amazing, some of these bad caps are still sitting on store
> shelves in some shops waiting to be sold or being used in
> new equipment (such as the new wireless N routers and other consumer gear).
>
>
>
> On 6/29/10 4:41 PM, keith smith wrote:
>
>   I have 3 Dells and might not buy anything new until next year.  I'm now
> considering  another vendor even though I have had great experience with
> their products and service.
>
>
> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/In-FaultyComputer-Suit-Window-nytimes-2375403564.html?x=0
>
>
> ------------------------
> Keith Smith
>
>
>
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-- 
A mouse trap, placed on top of your alarm clock, will prevent you from
rolling over and going back to sleep after you hit the snooze button.

Stephen
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