What did Dell do last decade? A newly unsealed lawsuit outlines a troubling history of selling computers with faulty motherboards, only to learn that they were defective and replace them with more faulty parts, all the while playing dumb and misleading customers about the origin and extent of the problem.
Serious allegations. Dell says it’s old news, and that other PC makers were affected similarly by an Asian supplier operating on the cheap. Just the same, millions of defective OptiPlex machines flooded the market from 2003 to 2005, and the lawsuit remains unsettled. Hardware Central takes a look.
PC giant Dell has been accused of selling millions of desktop PCs that it knew had a severe motherboard defect, according to recently unsealed court documents from a three-year old lawsuit.
The civil suit, first reported Tuesday by The New York Times, was filed in 2007 by Fayetteville, N.C.-based Advanced Internet Technologies in Federal District Court in North Carolina. It said Dell employees knew since 2004 that the company’s OptiPlex business PCs were likely to break.
