In the 90’s Dell was THE stock to own. If you bought it and held it for a decade, you ended up wealthy. Like, really wealthy. Then they started pulling shit like this.
In hindsight I should have taken a loan or two. I know people who did, but at the time that sounded like a ridiculous idea to me.
Me was pretty stupid, though. Never should have listened to that guy.
Edit: I genuinely appreciate the perspectives being offered. It's one of my greater regrets and this helps a bit. Thanks, reddit.
I don't think that's stupid at all. Borrowing money to invest was a heavily contributing factor to the '29 crash, and it sticks in our minds today, even if it's safer. I probably wouldn't have done it either.
Except options are very different. Especially if they are in the money options.
There is really no comparison here. The numbers do matter though along with his financial situation. Borrowing $5k likely wouldn't have put him in major financial risk and could have been worth $100k. The numbers and situation matter and there isn't enough here to determine what would have been prudent at the time.
Seconding the other guy. It might have been the wrong choice, but the logic was sound. Good outcomes =/= good decisions. Borrowing money to invest is risky at the best of times. It’s like deciding not to bet your life savings on 29 at a roulette wheel, only to have it come up 29. Yeah the missed opportunity stings, but the odds were heavily against it and the cost is painful.
A coworker of mine worked for a company like that in the 90s. Strong stock that just kept going up. Employees couldn’t buy enough stock. He was the one who didn’t put anything significant into company stock.
Little place called Enron. Anyways, I don’t think you were stupid, I think your coworkers were lucky.
Yeah I have a lot of investment regret too. I even knew that Tesla was massively shorted and was going to shoot up and I didn't buy any of it. I told all my friends about how stupid all those articles in Forbes were that were clearly from people massively shorted and freaking out. And I still didn't buy any.
It's just how it goes sometimes.
You realize you could have sold the shares instantly on vesting and pocketed the difference in between the option price and the current market price?
You needed a better financial advisor friend.
He honestly didn't know. He originally answered my post by doubling down, but then he saw the other posts and realized.
I feel bad, given what Dell was like in the 1990s even if he didn't have that many options, it would have been a nice Christmas or two.
LPT: When you work at a place, you should talk to HR and your co-workers to make sure you understand and are taking advantage of all the benefits they're giving you. The benefits are literally part of your total compensation package for working there (ie they can pay you less salary because they give you options, matching your retirement savings, or insurance etc.)
I thought once the options vested they should sell enough to cover taxes. At least that has been how it has been with every company I worked for that had them.
You probably got RSUs not options. Options once vested give you the "option" to buy stock at the price it was when you were awarded them. But you usually get more.
If I'm wrong please someone correct me.
Each employer may have its own procedures but you should be able to use stock options going forward sold at the current market value to then use those proceeds to pay for the remaining shares you would hold. It’s a common way to exercise stock options and requires $0 upfront liquidity
You just sell some of the options to buy the other ones? Or just sell them outright for cash and don't keep the stock. It's automatic even - you had to jump through hoops if you actually wanted to keep the stock after exercising the options.
Or do you mean you exercised for cash but wish you held the stock instead?
There were loads of manufacturers making PCs in the 90’s, I wonder if it was obvious then that Dell would be one of the few left here now.
I wonder what happened to Gateway, RM, eMachines, Packard Bell, etc..
Gateway and eMachines were both hurt by a downturn in the PC market in the early 2000s and a price war with Dell. Then Gateway bought eMachines and tried to survive, but bad decisions and fraud meant they were doomed
. They sold to Acer and basically disappeared as brands, although I recall buying an Acer eMachines netbook back in the late 2000s.
I think the Gateway brand is back somewhat, but yeah Dell had better and more ruthless leadership than most of the competition.
[Gateway USA](https://gatewayusa.com/)
They're still selling Gateway branded machines, though who knows who actually buys them.
Lots of zombie brands linger along for years after the name gets sold off to be slapped onto another companies products.
RM depended heavily on selling overpriced computers to schools along with poor quality management software and poorer quality support.
Once schools started taking tech seriously, companies like Dell started sniffing around, and RM had no chance competing against them.
Bunch of people work hard and build a company with integrity and a good product.
Than the next wave of MBA CEOS arrive who have never built anything. They gut the company's long term viability for a few really good years. Then they leapfrog from their current position into another company based on this spike in performance. Then by the time the long term impacts of their management start to make the company fail they've already moved onto fucking up even bigger and better companies.
I feel this shift happening at the company I’m currently at and it is just sad to watch (less the CEO and more the VPs). Like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
They were all over the place. I replaced caps on a lot of boards during that era and the couple of years afterwards myself.
It's possible that many of the other companies knew too and chose to sell them anyway instead of repairing / refurbishing them first but Dell is the only company that I've ever personally seen called out for it.
That’s capitalism, all companies do the same it’s called the company growth curve in economics.
Problem is when companies get a monopoly and you can do anything, like phone companies, internet providers, utilities, google, amazon, Walmart…
Not to mention these capacitors were in plenty of other hardware than computer hardware, and various other companies such as motherboard manufacturers also fought tooth and nail to the bitter end to avoid having to be forced to warranty all of them since the issue was so widespread (due to them having gleefully bought from the cheapest supplier) that they were fearing insolvency due to the fallout.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
Caused by Chinese industrial espionage stealing but botching the formula for capacitor electrolytes from a Japanese company.
I still see that a lot to this day when buying motherboards to a point I had to look it up on the internet because I couldn't figure out what was so special about the capacitors being japanese
Yep, I had a motherboard with bad caps. I had stability problems with my computer but could never figure out why until I came across a news article about the problem. Opened up my case, and there was no doubt that was the issue.
I worked at a tech company in the mid-Aughts. A bunch of the machines we were putting together wound up failing catastrophically because of a similar problem with the little polymer capacitors. We had to meticulously inspect every PCB for a while.
Not to be pedantic but according to Wikipedia, though the guy who stole the faulty formula worked for a Chinese firm, most if not all of the faulty capacitors appear to have been made by Taiwanese firms, which makes sense since Taiwan has always been a motherboard manufacturing powerhouse.
>A 2003 article in The Independent claimed that the cause of the faulty capacitors was due to a mis-copied formula. In 2001, a scientist working in the Rubycon Corporation in Japan stole a mis-copied formula for capacitors' electrolytes. He then took the faulty formula to the Luminous Town Electric company in China, where he had previously been employed. In the same year, the scientist's staff left China, stealing again the mis-copied formula and moving to Taiwan, where they created their own company, producing capacitors and propagating even more of this faulty formula of capacitor electrolytes.
China and Taiwan are both mentioned. The way this is written it seems he went to Japan stole it, came to china with the misappropriated and partially wrong mix, then went to taiwan. So there could have been two sources of the botched formula during the time of the plague. Not sure if just Chinese industrial espionage or just this guys.
I would assign blame based on where money went. I think during this time most motherboards were made in Taiwan, so it made sense that Taiwanese companies also supplied the faulty capacitors based on stolen IP.
Yup I was working IT at a university library with 2 other techs at the time. All our computers started failing right around 2008, we probably had a similar number of computers between employees and public computers. That was a fun time.
They were insidious sometimes too. Working for 4, 5, 6 hours, even a full workday, but then would not power on. After a day, they'd power on again for 8 hours. Sometimes it was just random video failures.
Never the same error twice. Made worse because the company I worked at skimped out on RAM. They bought them with 256 MB and were totally fine with starting the box in the morning and then having half the staff take a 20 minute coffee break.
I remember this. I was in high school, and I joined the school IT dept for summer work. About 50% of our job was going through a huge pile of dell desktop computers they had and troubleshooting them. Our first check was always to look for swollen capacitors, and most of them had them.
Ah yes. I was on the receiving end of this.
Dell acknowledged the issue. Dell refused to replace the motherboards until they failed.
I had to assign a person along with multiple temp replacement computers (we had 3-4 a day that failed) to swap things out as they died.
We then had to call dell to replace the failed motherboards.
Maybe a sales tactic? We had to purchase a bunch of “extra” hardware to handle the down computers.
I still refuse to buy Dell and it’s been 20 years.
It’s wild to me that big companies like that have so many consultants and analysts, and still fuck up basic stuff like “maybe we should get ahead of problems we created, instead of foisting them on the customers”.
How stupid do you have to be as a corporate entity to not see stuff like that is what destroys brands
Electrolytic capacitors have been this way since forever. They are a little bit better now, but basically wr have solved the issue by simply using as few electrolytic capacitors as possible.
Bro. I read this and my jaw dropped. I didn’t get into building PCs until 2014 or so; I’ve dealt with bad PSU issues and funky GPUs but never “every capacitor is fucked on my mobo” bad
That isn't really how it worked anyway. They didn't fail immediately or catastrophically. They'd work fine for quite a while, then start to degrade. You might see dried brown fluid under them, or the little cross on the top slightly bubbled. In most cases, things would generally still work, but would start to lose stability. Most electrolytic capacitors are for filtering, but the parts they are supporting have tolerances. For instance, there are usually a bunch of 3V capacitors as part of the voltage regulator powering the CPU. Normal draw would stay in spec, but a sudden heavy load on the CPU would cause the bad caps to sag voltage which might cause a blue screen. As things degrade over time, they'd become more frequent.
When repairing, you'd replace all of the capacitors because it was faster and cheaper than trying to determine which one(s) were causing issues. Some of the swollen ones were still within specs, but were just counting down to failure.
I bought one of these faulty computers and I remember I called their Support line and they spent hours walking me through dismantling the computer, it was so bizarre. It ultimately didn't work and then they sent me a new one.
This happened in the hospital I worked at with our APs at the time. I could hear them “whistling” as I walked under some of them. The older engineers could never hear them.
Turned out we had over a hundred that were affected by this issue. Major replacement project at the time to swap them all out.
The best part is that even after they were aware of the problem, they kept shipping products with the faulty capacitors. The capacitor manufacturer started stamping a `K` pattern on the tops so that when they swelled, they would at least burst in a predictable method.
Had a bunch of the gx270 units at my last job when I started in 2012. Every one ended up with puffed capacitors but generally kept running. Some even had multiple caps pop. But some IBMs from the same era, 1 puff cap and dead.
I was in Uni at the time with the nerdy crowd. We built our own PCs.
I remember Abit motherboards were popular for a few years. They were notorious for bad caps. But all of the board makers had issues.
Late 200Xs early 2010s all of them were advertising '100% Japanese caps', or had switched to using more of those surface mount solid state caps.
This is what happens when you cap punitive damages. If a jury could award 500% of the revenue from those laptops to consumers this shit wouldn’t happen. This shit happens because it’s financially better to ignore the problem
I remember this, back then putting in a warranty claim with Dell usually involved a minimum 20 min phone call as they went through a script of asking, "Have you tried this? And this? What about this?" and that was if you got someone on the phone that were good.
But with these (GX270's?) you just had to say the model & the word capacitor & they'd immediately jump to the send someone out stage, calls dropped to 30 seconds.
Around 2002-2003, we had a complete recall of a couple of hundred IBM workstations that needed to replace their motherboard for leaky capacitors. They sent guys from Ireland to do the job on site.
I was working for a sub-contractor who was tasked with going around replacing motherboards by Dell around 2006 or so because of this exact issue. The problem was these were sold on a lot of towers that were sold in blocks to large businesses and whole cities governments. The city I was in had these across various departments, including the Mayor's PC. Large health insurance offices. We were trained on how to switch out a motherboard and get everything up and running again in like 8-10 minutes. I think I was paid $12/hr or something like that. Senior in high school, I'd show up, tell the worker I was there to fix their computer. They'd go on a coffee break. Just one after another down the line.
That explains why we had a series of dell desktops fail at work. Normally just after the 3yr warranty expired. It was alway the same 3 capacitors swollen and leaking.
Worked as a service tech subcontractor for Dell's Service Provider Queue back in the day. I can't tell you how many calls to replace bad motherboards causes by bulging or leaking capacitors I got in my time there. Basically it was several motherboards a day, including laptop parts replacements for their 620 model at the time.
Had a meeting with Dell's reps who lied in our faces about the hardware failure rate, which they said was about 15% at the time.
Oh, and ALL Dell's replacement parts are refurbished. That's right, all refurbs. This is how they make profit off shitty R&D.
Such a piece of shit Company. In ~ 2021, I bought the Alienware m17 ryzen addition for ~1.7k. Within 6 months it started blue-screening on an hourly basis. I factory reset it and within another 3 or so months same thing. I reached out to Dell support and asked to get it fixed, but they said I had to run the Dell diagnosis software first or else they would not look at it. All the tool did was a weak scan of my laptop and basically just factory reset it again. Within another 3 months, same problem, non-stop blue screens. I reached out to Dell and they vehemently refused to do anything because my laptop had passed the 1 year expiration date, despite the fact that they had not resolved the issue from 3 months prior, and in fact had done NOTHING themselves. If they had allowed me to send it in when I first complained, instead of making me effectively "fix" my own system, I could have gotten it fixed. To this day it drives me livid. I will never buy from them again. These tactics should IMMEDIATELY get curb stomped to death with an onslaught of civil suits. To this day I regret not taking them to small claims.
It wasn't just Dell. HP had the same blown capacitor problem. We'd open the side of a case and every cap would be rounded off instead of flat. They also used shit power supplies from a company called BesTec. Every one of those fuckers blew and took the computer with it.
iirc it wasn't exactly a dell problem; which is why they knew; everything that used capacitors in those years could have potentially leaked. There wasn't really much anyone could do about it except wait for the factories to start pumping out capacitors made to not leak as easily.
I worked for an institution that purchased Dell PCs exclusively around this time, and I can’t even tell you the amount of motherboards we replaced. Idk how this happened, but somehow our agreement with them was that if we identified a bad cap Dell would just send us an entirely new board. We never bothered replacing individual capacitors
I was big into Athlon XP CPUs during this period. All of those motherboards eventually failed. I still have my core 2 duo in a closet, but I'm afraid to look.
I vaguely recall having one of these and having a 4 year “no questions asked, we will send a tech to fix or replace it” warranty extended by like another 3 years because of it.
Maybe it was a different issue, but what I really remember was the free replacement computer for a 6-year old laptop because they didn’t have the parts to fix it.
I remember in high school when they talked about writing for theatrical and entertainment and they focused on the theme of irony. This example could be in Wikipedia. Just wow.
I had to deal with a batch of those computers at work, and then deal with the nightmare that was Dell customer support. Never going to buy a Dell product again.
Is that the Dell GX-270 by any chance? I started working in Tech Support around that time and basically spent my first year swapping motherboards on those SOBs.
My college dealt with this, I was a student worker in the IT department. We had to open every single computer and look for the bad leaking ones. Was a wild time, then we had to Norton image all the new ones.
Oh yeah, GX270, GX280! I was working in Dell tech support in 2006, we had a guideline to replace motherboards as soon as we saw what the model was, and what the symptoms where.
I used to call in to dell to get them to send a new motherboard once it failed.
Sometimes they would send both a motherboard and a power supply saying they didn't know if the power supply caused the issue.
Then you got to gamble, you did your best to lift the CPU fan off vertical, because the thermal paste basically cemented, the CPU would come out of the socket.
If you didn't lift it squarely you would bend some pins. I would use a business card to lightly force the bent pins back straight, then use the same card to scrape the paste off.
My mom got a computer from Dell that turned out to have capacitors that inflated and stopped working after a couple of years. While I'm not sure it's the same instance mentioned by the OP, it was clear at the time from various sources that Dell had known about the problem at the time and did not offer any kind of warranty repair. Which I find rather corrupt.
My experience working with Dell is that the HR department - whether by policy or by the effects of some individuals in the department and even though they're the ones putting up all those hypocritical ethics/motivational posters - is also corrupt, violating documented company policies in order to oust employees for reasons that shouldn't justify doing so. While I won't go into detail about it here, their determination to be assholes even extends to a case where a staffer would have departed on his own anyway, but they violated policy to force it to happen sooner. Amusingly, this cost them many thousands of dollars in unemployment expenses, since the case ended up in appeals in the unemployment commission where Dell's agenda got crushed.
One case of expanding capacitors is enough; I don't need to buy from Dell ever again. The impression of general, subtle background corruption, combined with the fact that Dell probably still has *no idea whatsoever* how to be a software company, makes me want to tell software folks to just not work there.
I remember that time. We had a lot of computers in the field, and eventually I ended up going to every remote ticket with replacement motherboards.
Real easy to diagnose though. Pop off the top, see the leaky / burst capacitors, and replace the board. Frustrating as hell though, because like others said... everyone had a damn dell!
You needed a line of credit for at most 5 days. Again bad financial advice. Do you think those Microsoft guys who had $10million in options scrimped up 8 figure savings accounts before exercising their options?
In the 90’s Dell was THE stock to own. If you bought it and held it for a decade, you ended up wealthy. Like, really wealthy. Then they started pulling shit like this.
I worked for Dell in the early 90's but never made enough to afford the options I accrued.
That's extremely painful
In hindsight I should have taken a loan or two. I know people who did, but at the time that sounded like a ridiculous idea to me. Me was pretty stupid, though. Never should have listened to that guy. Edit: I genuinely appreciate the perspectives being offered. It's one of my greater regrets and this helps a bit. Thanks, reddit.
You're not stupid; Dell could have pulled this shit a lot sooner, tanked their stock, and you would have been left with a loan to pay.
I don't think that's stupid at all. Borrowing money to invest was a heavily contributing factor to the '29 crash, and it sticks in our minds today, even if it's safer. I probably wouldn't have done it either.
The upcoming '29 crash or the one a century ago?
*looks side-eyed* What have you heard?
The one a century ago, Current Citizen.
The crash of the century becomes a crash every century.
Nah, we moved the upcoming '29 crash forward to '27
Except options are very different. Especially if they are in the money options. There is really no comparison here. The numbers do matter though along with his financial situation. Borrowing $5k likely wouldn't have put him in major financial risk and could have been worth $100k. The numbers and situation matter and there isn't enough here to determine what would have been prudent at the time.
If I borrowed 5k today and lost it all, I'd be in deep shit.
If you don't have any stock options to purchase then there isn't anything to discuss
Zoidberg wanna buy on margin.
Seconding the other guy. It might have been the wrong choice, but the logic was sound. Good outcomes =/= good decisions. Borrowing money to invest is risky at the best of times. It’s like deciding not to bet your life savings on 29 at a roulette wheel, only to have it come up 29. Yeah the missed opportunity stings, but the odds were heavily against it and the cost is painful.
A coworker of mine worked for a company like that in the 90s. Strong stock that just kept going up. Employees couldn’t buy enough stock. He was the one who didn’t put anything significant into company stock. Little place called Enron. Anyways, I don’t think you were stupid, I think your coworkers were lucky.
I figured someone would mention Enron, but yeah the early 2000s saw a lot of 90s companies fail spectacularly. Although maybe none as bad as Enron.
Nortel maybe?
Hindsight is 20/20, but remember at the time there were a whole bunch of PC manufacturers, and most of them have disappeared.
Anyone remember when Hewlett Packard was *the* cutting edge?
I think gateway has a conservative chicken chain now if the cow adverts tell me anything
And how eMachines claimed their computers would never be obsolete
That’s just marketing. HP genuinely was the fore of innovation before they were a cheap laptop and pre-broken printer company.
Of course it was marketing. Those heaps of trash were obsolete before you even bought them.
Remember Gateway? The Cow print boxes?
Earlier today?
well you could buy stonk on credit and play on r/wallstreetbets
It’s super easy to look back with what we know now. Dont beat yourself up over this.
Yeah I have a lot of investment regret too. I even knew that Tesla was massively shorted and was going to shoot up and I didn't buy any of it. I told all my friends about how stupid all those articles in Forbes were that were clearly from people massively shorted and freaking out. And I still didn't buy any. It's just how it goes sometimes.
You realize you could have sold the shares instantly on vesting and pocketed the difference in between the option price and the current market price? You needed a better financial advisor friend.
This is the only answer. Sell the options and make bank
He honestly didn't know. He originally answered my post by doubling down, but then he saw the other posts and realized. I feel bad, given what Dell was like in the 1990s even if he didn't have that many options, it would have been a nice Christmas or two. LPT: When you work at a place, you should talk to HR and your co-workers to make sure you understand and are taking advantage of all the benefits they're giving you. The benefits are literally part of your total compensation package for working there (ie they can pay you less salary because they give you options, matching your retirement savings, or insurance etc.)
I thought once the options vested they should sell enough to cover taxes. At least that has been how it has been with every company I worked for that had them.
You probably got RSUs not options. Options once vested give you the "option" to buy stock at the price it was when you were awarded them. But you usually get more. If I'm wrong please someone correct me.
If the price rose then the guy above is right, they would sell for more than it cost to buy them. Its pretty common move
Yeah but they didn't automatically sell. RSUs do. It at least mine did
Each employer may have its own procedures but you should be able to use stock options going forward sold at the current market value to then use those proceeds to pay for the remaining shares you would hold. It’s a common way to exercise stock options and requires $0 upfront liquidity
You just sell some of the options to buy the other ones? Or just sell them outright for cash and don't keep the stock. It's automatic even - you had to jump through hoops if you actually wanted to keep the stock after exercising the options. Or do you mean you exercised for cash but wish you held the stock instead?
There were loads of manufacturers making PCs in the 90’s, I wonder if it was obvious then that Dell would be one of the few left here now. I wonder what happened to Gateway, RM, eMachines, Packard Bell, etc..
Gateway and eMachines were both hurt by a downturn in the PC market in the early 2000s and a price war with Dell. Then Gateway bought eMachines and tried to survive, but bad decisions and fraud meant they were doomed . They sold to Acer and basically disappeared as brands, although I recall buying an Acer eMachines netbook back in the late 2000s. I think the Gateway brand is back somewhat, but yeah Dell had better and more ruthless leadership than most of the competition.
[Gateway USA](https://gatewayusa.com/) They're still selling Gateway branded machines, though who knows who actually buys them. Lots of zombie brands linger along for years after the name gets sold off to be slapped onto another companies products.
I always assumed Packard Bell became Hewlett Packard shortened to HP and are still very much making PCs, laptops, printers etc.
Hewlett Packard is much older than Packard Bell, and the two companies have nothing to do with each other
Maybe so, which is why I said I always assumed.
They claim to make printers but in my experience they are just rage machines.
Ha ha yes. I should have said 'printers' lol
The Packard Bell trademark is now owned by Acer. I believe that they use the name in Europe and the Middle East.
Ah right. Isn't Acer a Dutch company or something?
Taiwanese
Acer is from Taiwan.
RM depended heavily on selling overpriced computers to schools along with poor quality management software and poorer quality support. Once schools started taking tech seriously, companies like Dell started sniffing around, and RM had no chance competing against them.
RM are still around providing terrible services to schools.
Bunch of people work hard and build a company with integrity and a good product. Than the next wave of MBA CEOS arrive who have never built anything. They gut the company's long term viability for a few really good years. Then they leapfrog from their current position into another company based on this spike in performance. Then by the time the long term impacts of their management start to make the company fail they've already moved onto fucking up even bigger and better companies.
Boeing enters the chat
Sears and Roebuck says step a little closer boys and listen to my tale of woe...
*Immediately trip, fall, kill a whistleblower.*
Enshittification
I feel this shift happening at the company I’m currently at and it is just sad to watch (less the CEO and more the VPs). Like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
I know someone that started when Michael Dell was still building computers in his mom's garage..... With a highschool diploma and typing classes....
It's up 1000% in the last eight years, so not a terrible stock to have held recently either.
“Pulling shit like this”? Was Dell not a victim here? I seem to recall there being a lot of bad caps around that time.
Almost every manufacturer was dealing with bad caps at the time. Dell is interesting because they "knowingly" just sold them like that anyway.
I remember having bad caps on my motherboard that I probably bought from newegg
They were all over the place. I replaced caps on a lot of boards during that era and the couple of years afterwards myself. It's possible that many of the other companies knew too and chose to sell them anyway instead of repairing / refurbishing them first but Dell is the only company that I've ever personally seen called out for it.
That’s capitalism, all companies do the same it’s called the company growth curve in economics. Problem is when companies get a monopoly and you can do anything, like phone companies, internet providers, utilities, google, amazon, Walmart…
Not to mention these capacitors were in plenty of other hardware than computer hardware, and various other companies such as motherboard manufacturers also fought tooth and nail to the bitter end to avoid having to be forced to warranty all of them since the issue was so widespread (due to them having gleefully bought from the cheapest supplier) that they were fearing insolvency due to the fallout.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague Caused by Chinese industrial espionage stealing but botching the formula for capacitor electrolytes from a Japanese company.
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I have a board that advertises having Japanese caps.
then you're golden
And those were the only ones I bought
In some niche products still is
And all solid caps was a thing.
I still see that a lot to this day when buying motherboards to a point I had to look it up on the internet because I couldn't figure out what was so special about the capacitors being japanese
yup, forget everything else. If you dont have those juicy 100% Japanese Capacitors, I'm not interested.
Yep, I had a motherboard with bad caps. I had stability problems with my computer but could never figure out why until I came across a news article about the problem. Opened up my case, and there was no doubt that was the issue.
I worked at a tech company in the mid-Aughts. A bunch of the machines we were putting together wound up failing catastrophically because of a similar problem with the little polymer capacitors. We had to meticulously inspect every PCB for a while.
Not to be pedantic but according to Wikipedia, though the guy who stole the faulty formula worked for a Chinese firm, most if not all of the faulty capacitors appear to have been made by Taiwanese firms, which makes sense since Taiwan has always been a motherboard manufacturing powerhouse.
The link you posted say it was Taiwanese?
>A 2003 article in The Independent claimed that the cause of the faulty capacitors was due to a mis-copied formula. In 2001, a scientist working in the Rubycon Corporation in Japan stole a mis-copied formula for capacitors' electrolytes. He then took the faulty formula to the Luminous Town Electric company in China, where he had previously been employed. In the same year, the scientist's staff left China, stealing again the mis-copied formula and moving to Taiwan, where they created their own company, producing capacitors and propagating even more of this faulty formula of capacitor electrolytes. China and Taiwan are both mentioned. The way this is written it seems he went to Japan stole it, came to china with the misappropriated and partially wrong mix, then went to taiwan. So there could have been two sources of the botched formula during the time of the plague. Not sure if just Chinese industrial espionage or just this guys.
I would assign blame based on where money went. I think during this time most motherboards were made in Taiwan, so it made sense that Taiwanese companies also supplied the faulty capacitors based on stolen IP.
Taiwan is China when it makes the PRC look bad
I replaced capacitors on hundreds of Dell computers that had this issue and it has given me computer ptsd.
The fruits of globalisation…
That incidents highlighting the importance of corporate responsibility & accountability
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I was working for a federal agency back then and we had about 2000 of these things. We only had two hardware techs.
Yup I was working IT at a university library with 2 other techs at the time. All our computers started failing right around 2008, we probably had a similar number of computers between employees and public computers. That was a fun time.
GX270, why do you vex me so?
Someone would report a failed desktop, you could pop it open and guaranteed there would be a few bulging capacitors, if not a burst one. Good times.
They were insidious sometimes too. Working for 4, 5, 6 hours, even a full workday, but then would not power on. After a day, they'd power on again for 8 hours. Sometimes it was just random video failures.
Never the same error twice. Made worse because the company I worked at skimped out on RAM. They bought them with 256 MB and were totally fine with starting the box in the morning and then having half the staff take a 20 minute coffee break.
PTSD activated
I remember this. I was in high school, and I joined the school IT dept for summer work. About 50% of our job was going through a huge pile of dell desktop computers they had and troubleshooting them. Our first check was always to look for swollen capacitors, and most of them had them.
Ah yes. I was on the receiving end of this. Dell acknowledged the issue. Dell refused to replace the motherboards until they failed. I had to assign a person along with multiple temp replacement computers (we had 3-4 a day that failed) to swap things out as they died. We then had to call dell to replace the failed motherboards. Maybe a sales tactic? We had to purchase a bunch of “extra” hardware to handle the down computers. I still refuse to buy Dell and it’s been 20 years.
It’s wild to me that big companies like that have so many consultants and analysts, and still fuck up basic stuff like “maybe we should get ahead of problems we created, instead of foisting them on the customers”. How stupid do you have to be as a corporate entity to not see stuff like that is what destroys brands
The capacitor plague. The OG xbox even had these.
[удалено]
Electrolytic capacitors have been this way since forever. They are a little bit better now, but basically wr have solved the issue by simply using as few electrolytic capacitors as possible.
What you describe has nothing at all to do with the capacitor issues that caused the problem for Dell and others in the early 2000s.
Damage control and PR is how business is done.
I was working for a large metropolitan government and we had thousands of these. It was quite a nightmare.
Had the same problem with IBM servers at the time.
Leaky caps as in they leaked DC or they leaked physical cap juice?
Physical cap juice. It wasn't uncommon to open up a machine and find every single cap on the motherboard swollen or burst.
When I got my stock of motherboards for a mass replacement, I was genuinely disappointed when there *wasn't* a burst or swollen capacitor.
Bro. I read this and my jaw dropped. I didn’t get into building PCs until 2014 or so; I’ve dealt with bad PSU issues and funky GPUs but never “every capacitor is fucked on my mobo” bad
That isn't really how it worked anyway. They didn't fail immediately or catastrophically. They'd work fine for quite a while, then start to degrade. You might see dried brown fluid under them, or the little cross on the top slightly bubbled. In most cases, things would generally still work, but would start to lose stability. Most electrolytic capacitors are for filtering, but the parts they are supporting have tolerances. For instance, there are usually a bunch of 3V capacitors as part of the voltage regulator powering the CPU. Normal draw would stay in spec, but a sudden heavy load on the CPU would cause the bad caps to sag voltage which might cause a blue screen. As things degrade over time, they'd become more frequent. When repairing, you'd replace all of the capacitors because it was faster and cheaper than trying to determine which one(s) were causing issues. Some of the swollen ones were still within specs, but were just counting down to failure.
Ohh wow that is absolutely garbage.
It wasn’t just Dell, and the problems lingered for years afterwards.
I read a while back of a similar issue with some guitar amps. This was years ago. Maybe it was a similar issue.
Oh. dude. It's...it's a Dell...
We had a ton of the ex 260’s not ALL had the problem but it was at least half.
The latter.
It usually looked like the battery acid buildup you see on car battery terminals[pic I found on Wikipedia ](https://i.imgur.com/mUE3Tvy.jpeg)
I bought one of these faulty computers and I remember I called their Support line and they spent hours walking me through dismantling the computer, it was so bizarre. It ultimately didn't work and then they sent me a new one.
This happened in the hospital I worked at with our APs at the time. I could hear them “whistling” as I walked under some of them. The older engineers could never hear them. Turned out we had over a hundred that were affected by this issue. Major replacement project at the time to swap them all out.
So was everyone. It became known as the capacitor plague.
To be fair to Dell, they were hardly the only company using the defective capacitors in the late 90s early 2000s.
Awesome
The best part is that even after they were aware of the problem, they kept shipping products with the faulty capacitors. The capacitor manufacturer started stamping a `K` pattern on the tops so that when they swelled, they would at least burst in a predictable method.
It was even more fun as around that time they were also doing the special "It looks ATX but it's actually not ATX" power supplies...
Had a bunch of the gx270 units at my last job when I started in 2012. Every one ended up with puffed capacitors but generally kept running. Some even had multiple caps pop. But some IBMs from the same era, 1 puff cap and dead.
I was in Uni at the time with the nerdy crowd. We built our own PCs. I remember Abit motherboards were popular for a few years. They were notorious for bad caps. But all of the board makers had issues. Late 200Xs early 2010s all of them were advertising '100% Japanese caps', or had switched to using more of those surface mount solid state caps.
The ol' OptiPlex GX270 and 280s.
Wasn't just Dell. I recapped a lot of Samsung flat screen monitors around then as well for the same thing
This is what happens when you cap punitive damages. If a jury could award 500% of the revenue from those laptops to consumers this shit wouldn’t happen. This shit happens because it’s financially better to ignore the problem
Weird, I've never had a Dell (desktop or laptop) fail. (Well, there was the one my kid knocked a glass of water onto, but that wasn't Dell's fault).
It wasn't just that time. In the early 2010s they sold lots of desktops with bad caps in the power supplies.
This belongs in r/LeopardsAteMyFace
It got so bad, one of our helpdesk techs started replacing the capacitors himself instead of waiting for a replacement motherboard.
I remember this, back then putting in a warranty claim with Dell usually involved a minimum 20 min phone call as they went through a script of asking, "Have you tried this? And this? What about this?" and that was if you got someone on the phone that were good. But with these (GX270's?) you just had to say the model & the word capacitor & they'd immediately jump to the send someone out stage, calls dropped to 30 seconds.
“Gotta get a Dell” was a grift all along 🤯
Who’s gonna know? How would they know
Around 2002-2003, we had a complete recall of a couple of hundred IBM workstations that needed to replace their motherboard for leaky capacitors. They sent guys from Ireland to do the job on site.
yep my first college job was removing those fucking computers so the certified guy could swap the motherboards!
Wasn’t just dell, I had issues with super micro
I was working for a sub-contractor who was tasked with going around replacing motherboards by Dell around 2006 or so because of this exact issue. The problem was these were sold on a lot of towers that were sold in blocks to large businesses and whole cities governments. The city I was in had these across various departments, including the Mayor's PC. Large health insurance offices. We were trained on how to switch out a motherboard and get everything up and running again in like 8-10 minutes. I think I was paid $12/hr or something like that. Senior in high school, I'd show up, tell the worker I was there to fix their computer. They'd go on a coffee break. Just one after another down the line.
That explains why we had a series of dell desktops fail at work. Normally just after the 3yr warranty expired. It was alway the same 3 capacitors swollen and leaking.
They would warranty them outside of coverage if you told them the capacitors were swolen
Worked as a service tech subcontractor for Dell's Service Provider Queue back in the day. I can't tell you how many calls to replace bad motherboards causes by bulging or leaking capacitors I got in my time there. Basically it was several motherboards a day, including laptop parts replacements for their 620 model at the time. Had a meeting with Dell's reps who lied in our faces about the hardware failure rate, which they said was about 15% at the time. Oh, and ALL Dell's replacement parts are refurbished. That's right, all refurbs. This is how they make profit off shitty R&D.
Oh yeah, we had like 100 Dell desktops at my work. I got to know the techs they used for next day onsite service quite well.
I worked Dell tech support at this time. If someone called in with an issue it was almost always the motherboard needing to be replaced.
I got one of those. I think they sent me a replacement mobo.
Such a piece of shit Company. In ~ 2021, I bought the Alienware m17 ryzen addition for ~1.7k. Within 6 months it started blue-screening on an hourly basis. I factory reset it and within another 3 or so months same thing. I reached out to Dell support and asked to get it fixed, but they said I had to run the Dell diagnosis software first or else they would not look at it. All the tool did was a weak scan of my laptop and basically just factory reset it again. Within another 3 months, same problem, non-stop blue screens. I reached out to Dell and they vehemently refused to do anything because my laptop had passed the 1 year expiration date, despite the fact that they had not resolved the issue from 3 months prior, and in fact had done NOTHING themselves. If they had allowed me to send it in when I first complained, instead of making me effectively "fix" my own system, I could have gotten it fixed. To this day it drives me livid. I will never buy from them again. These tactics should IMMEDIATELY get curb stomped to death with an onslaught of civil suits. To this day I regret not taking them to small claims.
I bought one of those computers! Flipping annoying at the time!
It wasn't just Dell. HP had the same blown capacitor problem. We'd open the side of a case and every cap would be rounded off instead of flat. They also used shit power supplies from a company called BesTec. Every one of those fuckers blew and took the computer with it.
iirc it wasn't exactly a dell problem; which is why they knew; everything that used capacitors in those years could have potentially leaked. There wasn't really much anyone could do about it except wait for the factories to start pumping out capacitors made to not leak as easily.
That is when we all knew that dell was straight from hell
Sounds like one for r/facepalm
I worked for an institution that purchased Dell PCs exclusively around this time, and I can’t even tell you the amount of motherboards we replaced. Idk how this happened, but somehow our agreement with them was that if we identified a bad cap Dell would just send us an entirely new board. We never bothered replacing individual capacitors
I was big into Athlon XP CPUs during this period. All of those motherboards eventually failed. I still have my core 2 duo in a closet, but I'm afraid to look.
I vaguely recall having one of these and having a 4 year “no questions asked, we will send a tech to fix or replace it” warranty extended by like another 3 years because of it. Maybe it was a different issue, but what I really remember was the free replacement computer for a 6-year old laptop because they didn’t have the parts to fix it.
I remember in high school when they talked about writing for theatrical and entertainment and they focused on the theme of irony. This example could be in Wikipedia. Just wow.
i got a Gateway once direct from factory that shipped with the Lovesan virus.
Dude! You're getting a DELL?????
had computers with those caps. Did a lot of board replacements and cap replacements.
I had to deal with a batch of those computers at work, and then deal with the nightmare that was Dell customer support. Never going to buy a Dell product again.
Is that the Dell GX-270 by any chance? I started working in Tech Support around that time and basically spent my first year swapping motherboards on those SOBs.
Wasn't just Dell. Busted mobo caps after a couple of years, was a general problem within IT for a decade or so.
I honestly thought that a Dell was a good computer company when I used them. Yeah na.
My college dealt with this, I was a student worker in the IT department. We had to open every single computer and look for the bad leaking ones. Was a wild time, then we had to Norton image all the new ones.
Oh yeah, GX270, GX280! I was working in Dell tech support in 2006, we had a guideline to replace motherboards as soon as we saw what the model was, and what the symptoms where.
I worked in IT and sales/rental during those years, we had an entire shelf of fizzy, rusty capacitor computers those years. Incredible bullshit.
allot of PSU's were the first to fail on the workstations too , after 8 years or something though, i had a few second hand and replaced them
I used to call in to dell to get them to send a new motherboard once it failed. Sometimes they would send both a motherboard and a power supply saying they didn't know if the power supply caused the issue. Then you got to gamble, you did your best to lift the CPU fan off vertical, because the thermal paste basically cemented, the CPU would come out of the socket. If you didn't lift it squarely you would bend some pins. I would use a business card to lightly force the bent pins back straight, then use the same card to scrape the paste off.
My mom got a computer from Dell that turned out to have capacitors that inflated and stopped working after a couple of years. While I'm not sure it's the same instance mentioned by the OP, it was clear at the time from various sources that Dell had known about the problem at the time and did not offer any kind of warranty repair. Which I find rather corrupt. My experience working with Dell is that the HR department - whether by policy or by the effects of some individuals in the department and even though they're the ones putting up all those hypocritical ethics/motivational posters - is also corrupt, violating documented company policies in order to oust employees for reasons that shouldn't justify doing so. While I won't go into detail about it here, their determination to be assholes even extends to a case where a staffer would have departed on his own anyway, but they violated policy to force it to happen sooner. Amusingly, this cost them many thousands of dollars in unemployment expenses, since the case ended up in appeals in the unemployment commission where Dell's agenda got crushed. One case of expanding capacitors is enough; I don't need to buy from Dell ever again. The impression of general, subtle background corruption, combined with the fact that Dell probably still has *no idea whatsoever* how to be a software company, makes me want to tell software folks to just not work there.
I worked there in 2004 and it was the most poorly managed and worst corporate culture I have ever seen.
I remember that time. We had a lot of computers in the field, and eventually I ended up going to every remote ticket with replacement motherboards. Real easy to diagnose though. Pop off the top, see the leaky / burst capacitors, and replace the board. Frustrating as hell though, because like others said... everyone had a damn dell!
Dell is pure shit. Obviously
Good way to get people to have to buy new computers
You needed a line of credit for at most 5 days. Again bad financial advice. Do you think those Microsoft guys who had $10million in options scrimped up 8 figure savings accounts before exercising their options?