O.T.-Chemicals Leaking Inside Your Computer

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On Tuesday June 29, 2010, 12:02 pm EDT

 

After the math department at the University of Texas noticed some of its Dell

computers failing, Dell examined the machines. The company came up with an

unusual reason for the computers’ demise: the school had overtaxed the

machines by making them perform difficult math calculations.

Dell, however, had actually sent the university, in Austin, desktop PCs riddled

with faulty electrical components that were leaking chemicals and causing the

malfunctions. Dell sold millions of these computers from 2003 to 2005 to major

companies like Wal-Mart and Wells Fargo, institutions like the Mayo Clinic and

small businesses.

“The funny thing was that every one of them went bad at the same time,†said

Greg Barry, the president of PointSolve, a technology services company near

Philadelphia that had bought dozens. “It’s unheard-of, but Dell didn’t

seem to recognize this as a problem at the time.â€

Documents recently unsealed in a three-year-old lawsuit against Dell show that

the company’s employees were actually aware that the computers were likely to

break. Still, the employees tried to play down the problem to customers and

allowed customers to rely on trouble-prone machines, putting their businesses at

risk. Even the firm defending Dell in the lawsuit was affected when Dell balked

at fixing 1,000 suspect computers, according to e-mail messages revealed in the

dispute..............................The problems affecting the Dell computers

stemmed from an industrywide encounter with bad capacitors produced by Asian PC

component suppliers. Capacitors are found on computer motherboards, playing a

crucial role in the flow of current across the hardware. They are not meant to

pop and leak fluid, but that is exactly what was happening earlier this decade,

causing computers made by Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Apple and others to break.

According to company memorandums and other documents recently unsealed in a

civil case against Dell in Federal District Court in North Carolina, Dell

appears to have suffered from the bad capacitors, made by a company called

Nichicon, far more than its rivals. Internal documents show that Dell shipped at

least 11.8 million computers from May 2003 to July 2005 that were at risk of

failing because of the faulty components. These were Dell’s OptiPlex desktop

computers — the company’s mainstream products sold to business and

government customers.

A study by Dell found that OptiPlex computers affected by the bad capacitors

were expected to cause problems up to 97 percent of the time over a three-year

period, according to the lawsuit.

 

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