JDPFu.com 2025

This morning, I was going through the normal RSS feeds that I read daily. Slashdot.org is in the top 5 reads.

As I write this there is an article titled Dell Knew About Computer Failures in the RSS feed. Clicking on it initially took me to a page with that title, but no content.

CrossChris writes " Freedom of information’ has revealed details of a lawsuit against Dell where they admit that they knew about a high failure rate of their products, but hid it from their corporate customers! From the article: ‘…Dell apparently encouraged its salespeople and technicians to not let customers know about known defects, and said internally that most customers (those who had not bought more than 50 machines) would be subject to “fix on fail”—that is, the company would only help them when their machines broke down. An internal presentation on the Optiplex GX and SX270 acknowledges that the company had discovered “quality issues,” but that employees should not proactively bring them to customers’ attention.’"

I read about this story yesterday on anther web site, so seeing it removed from /. is concerning. OTOH, I bet Dell is a major advertiser on /. so having the story removed would be a smart moved to retain those revenues. I don’t know that the article was removed – it could just be a publishing glitch or some other technical issue.

There is a /. discussion page related to the article still with a few comments.

A quick search of Dell on slashdot shows they haven’t pulled too many negative stories previously.

Arstechnica didn’t pull their version of the story.

My interest is mainly from a laptop that died a few weeks after the warranty ended. Dell Support was completely useless.