Consumer Protection

When Google studied a hundred thousand SATA and PATA hard drives recently (http://tinyurl.com/2yhblk) they found that 56% of drives with SMART technology failed to raise flags when they went south. Interesting because the sole purpose of SMART is to monitor the health of hard drives.

We've all seen hard drive manufacturers go through periods of unreliability. Some get out of the race when their reputation takes too huge a performance hit, but most just hang in there until they finally get it right or until they're bought out by other manufacturers.

A big disappointment currently is with motherboards. I don't see a lot of happy people with newer motherboards, not with Abit, Asus, Gigabyte, whatever. I do see lots and lots of complaints, especially with the lack of support which is sometimes atrocious. Don't like your motherboard? The answer seems to be "Buy a later version and you might get lucky".

Then there's the memory issue where people are being sold 4 gigs of memory only to find that current Intel architecture will use up to a gig of that memory for system allocation. A system might show 3.25 gigs of memory when 4 gigs is inserted no matter the OS and no matter if it's running 32 bit or 64 bit. And apparently there's very little that can be done to increase available memory. But the buyer isn't forewarned about the Intel memory glitch; he/she is just told this overpriced memory is needed to increase performance. When somebody complains they're not getting what they paid for, the standard excuse is that the memory shown runs in dual channel mode and that's a significant performance boost. Truth is as the manufacturer tells it, and the consumer has no recourse except to accept it and fume in futility.

So much for consumer protection.