Whilst the world is slowly recovering from the recent financial downturn and businesses are starting to feel the recovery, Dell have more problems to contend with.

In documents leaked to the New York Times it shows that Dell were knowingly selling machines it new to be faulty. The Optiplex desktops sold between 2003 and 2005 had faulty capacitors on the motherboard, these faults affected approximately 11.8 million machines, Dell investigated the fault and internal figures showed it would likely affect 97% of the machines sold over a three year period.

The company changed some affected boards with other defective components and staff were told not to proactively tell customers and to "emphasize the uncertainty" of the situation.

The University of Texas was told it had overloaded it´s machines with complex maths as a way of fending off a claim for a large number of machines. Advanced  Internet Technologies are claiming $40m in damages and even the law firm defending Dell in the case was caught up in the problem as Dell refused to repair 1000 affected machines.

Eventually Dell set aside $300M to help settle the case and repair or replace the machines.