A number of Dell motherboards have been found to have malware in the ESM firmware.

Um what? How'd that happen? Unauthorised changes or malware have managed to slip into firmware images at Dell. The article points out that it is only a small number of motherboards and they were only maintenance swap out boards but even so, do you trust them?

People need more reasons not to buy Dell? Lets see what problems I have seen over the past few years with Dell equipment bought by various companies I've worked for, or friends systems:

1. Bad capacitors on motherboards. Sure, it was an industry problem, but Dell actively covered it up even when they knew of a 97% failure rate.

2. Probably a 60% or higher failure rate on various Dell XPS 7x0 series systems due to bad engineering. Some of these failures were due to the bad NVidia chipset issues, but others due to putting sensitive components directly behind the hot running extreme series CPU heatsinks. It's bad enough that two companies I have worked for have junked most of their XPS desktops in favor of Precision workstations.

3. Defective Inspiron series laptops that lead to lawsuits. A friend of mine owned one of the 5150s, and the system never really worked properly without overheating. Prior to the lawsuit settlement, he was forced to either buy new cooling parts, or just hold onto a bad system. The new cooling parts never resolved the issue either. Part of the problem on some of these systems was Dell's tendency to shove desktop class Pentium 4 processors into a mobile case.

4. Newer Dell RAID controllers block non Dell drives. A firmware upgrade will unblock it at some point, still waiting... Not supporting 3rd party drives is one thing, actively blocking them is a horrible idea. I have a server collecting dust right now since we can't put it into production because we want to use Intel SSDs.

5. Various issues with the DRAC (Dell Remote Access Cards) that cause servers to either not boot properly when the card fails, or generally being unreliable. It's gotten a little better with newer systems where I can actually remote install an OS via the DRAC, but I still haven't seen great luck with a device that is supposed to cut down on hands on time with a server.

6. Lack of RAID controller compatibility between many servers, making it very difficult, if not impossible to migrate drives from an old server to a new one.

7. Not shipping Windows CDs with new computers, and bogging them down with so much crapware that they are unusable out of the box.

I could probably go on, but these are the more serious issues I've seen over the years. I don't trust their desktops, laptops, or servers in production. That doesn't leave much to like about them. Initially I figured the Dell horror stories I heard while employed at Compaq/HP were just scare tactics or something. Then I've seen first hand the problems, and now I try to stay far away. Dell tempts companies with lower up front costs, but odds are, their TCO is way higher then competitors when factoring in downtime due to defects and time it takes to put their crap into production.

Apparently it's "just" a trojan on the flash filesystem, not really in the firmware itself, and only on motherboards coming from the service depot.

Sounds like someone in the service department working on reloading data onto the motherboards got a trojan that infected the image he created.

Hrm. So these motherboards have the Dell diagnostic tools built into them or something? I don't see why this would even be inside the ESM firmware and how you'd even get it infected. Still stupid anyway and a potential PR disaster for Dell.

Save time! Buy a Dell server and its prepwned for your convenience!

Yeah, you can get pwned even before you install Windows. That's a massive timesaver!

They have diagnostic and management tools and such built in, yes. It's not really in the firmware. There's a filesystem on flash that can be mounted. I don't run Windows on my Dell systems, so I don't really quite know how it works or what exactly is stored on that filesystem.