Normally, I think that Dell machines are pretty good machines. People beat down on them because they have had a bad experience. When you make as many items as they do, you’re bound to make a bad one now and again.

Unfortunately, today, my workstation at work stopped working. I tore it open and found that all the capacitors on the motherboard were either bulging or had begun leaking. (hint: that’s bad.) So, I go to the Dell site and check on the warranty… Nope. Out of warranty. What’s more, this is the second of three of this particular model that have done this very same thing. And it seems to be fairly common with this model of main board.

And you can’t tell me that Dell didn’t know about this fault. But the cost to replace them all was greater than the cost to replace only the ones that went bad during the warranty period. That’s sucky. If this were my home pc, I would be unable to do just about anything. Luckily, it’s a work pc, so I’ve got a spare or two that I can use until I get a new motherboard. (thank you eBay.)

So, Dell is on my list today. That’s bad business even if it is technically “good business”.

UPDATE: As you can see in the comments, someone from Dell happened upon this post.  My thanks go out to him for making an exception and sending me a couple of replacement boards.  It’s certainly better business, but great business would have to recognized the problem and sent replacements at the beginning.