Newly unearthed documents from a lawsuit filed three years ago against Dell have confirmed that the company knowingly sold flawed PCs. According to the documents, some company employees had prior knowledge that the OptiPlex PCs Dell was selling to customers were likely to fail within three years.

As a report in the New York Times notes, about 12 million OptiPlex desktops were shipped between 2003 and 2005 with mainboard capacitors that, according to company e-mail messages, Dell employees knew were faulty. Says the NY Times, “The employees tried to play down the problem to customers and allowed customers to rely on trouble-prone machines, putting their businesses at risk.”

Staff were told to avoid acknowledging the mainboards were bad and downplayed breakdowns, even when batches of 1,000 or more PCs (including, quite brilliantly, those of its eventual legal defence) failed at the same time.

In 2005, Dell eventually admitted to the issue and set aside $300 million to mend and replace computers. The company also tried to downplay the effects by saying the capacitors didn’t cause data loss or pose a safety risk.

The problems affecting the Dell computers stemmed from an industry-wide encounter with bad capacitors produced by Asian PC component suppliers with HP and Apple also falling victim to the issue. Though according to the recently unsealed court documents, Dell appears to have suffered from the bad capacitors, made by a company called Nichicon, far more than its rivals.