Dell’s old motherboard problem rearing its head again?
I just came across an interesting read about the now infamous bad capacitor problems that plagued Dell, HP, and other manufacturers through 2005. Here’s the link. What is interesting is how hard Dell worked to hide the problem from customers and in some cases actually used the motherboard failures to try to upsell higher end hardware to customers.
I see several older desktops a month that are affected by these bad capacitors. Most of them are either Dell or eMachines. However, I have seen other brands have the same problem. I believe the difference is in how fast each individual brand was to replace faulty motherboards vs trying to hide the problem. Additionally, Dell replaced faulty boards with new boards that had the same faulty capacitors.