Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

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For about 6-9 months in 2006 We had a series of Dell Optiplex GX 270s that had a remarkable failure rate - close to 60% of our systems failed. We knew that Dell must have been having a tough time, when the FIRST question they asked on a support call was whether we saw any "Bulging Capacitors on the Motherboard" - I mean, not "Have you Tried Rebooting", or, "Have you tried powering down for 90 seconds", but "Do you have bulging capacitors."

I'll say this for Dell though - they fixed every last one of those systems within 4 hours of our call.

I have to wonder whether Large Manufacturing organizations are aware that there is a good chance that going with subpar capacitor manufactures will cost them, but do so anyways because of the amount of money they save.

First it was the Maxtor hard drives that went bad, then it was the capacitors popping. The company I worked for at the time had literally thousands of these things--and nearly every single one had to get a new motherboard and hard drive before the warranty cycle completed.

Also, we had a Dell 'certification' that essentially let us go to a part of the website, and order the replacement parts for any warrantied system. It was really slick. When the site didn't get it done, there was a super-secret US-based support line we could call :)

How did they fix a hardware failure in 4 hours?

Telekinesis? Teleportation?

Is there something I'm not understanding?

Enterprise customers can get hardware replacements same-day.

When I worked for $BIGCORP we'd get hardware failure calls from IBM to the tune of "server just phoned in with a drive failure, that part's not in stock locally, a plane left Atlanta with the part 15 minutes ago."

It was damn slick.

You just call them, and they separately courier-ship parts to you and send a technician onsite.

Go buy a $984 3 Ghz 2 Gbyte Dell Optiplex 780, and, for an additional $216, you get 3 Year 4HR 7x24 Onsite Service.

And yes, I've called them at 11:00 at night. :-)

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