Warranty voided for peace of mind

So I was pleased to snag an MSI Wind U123 for my birthday, one of the last red ones no less.  It's small, has the performance I want, plenty of storage capacity and is really lightweight and portable to the max.  The screen is sharp and bright, and the wireless signal is strong.  I can run both Windows XP and Ubuntu on it without any problems.

Less than a month of use in and I start hearing this weird grinding sound emanating from the cooling fan.  At first I figured it was just because I had left it running all night.  Then it started returning at various intervals, with no rhyme or reason to it.  A bit of research revealed this is a common issue with netbooks featuring Intel Atom motherboards.

The issue is relatively easy to correct - a drop of sewing machine oil in the fan.  The problem - MSI covered one of the screwholes with a warranty void if tampered sticker.  I was now facing shipping the laptop off for 4-6 weeks to deal with a noisy fan, or else voiding the warranty to correct the problem.  And to be clear - I'm generally a fairly tolerant person - but this noise was not of a level that any sane person could possibly tolerate for long.  I was already starting to tap on the side of the casing or turning it upside down to try to get it to stop - sometimes successfully, although it would never stay silent for very long.

To back up a tad, you need to understand that these issues stem from a combination of being a computer repair tech for roughly a decade and also from increasing frustration with decisions made by the Intel corporation regarding their products. When it comes to computer tech I intend to use myself I am rather picky about what brand or type I will purchase.

Intel has been an issue for me starting with the slot 1 series of processors.  Initially I did not realize that the design of the Pentium II processor was primarily to make it harder for the competition (AMD and Cyrix) to design products to fit the architecture of motherboards designed for Intel processors.  For those of you who are not technically inclined - before the Pentium II processor there were motherboards that supported processors made by Intel, AMD and also Cyrix (the less said about Cyrix the better).  What this meant for consumers who custom built their own computers (as I have done with every personal computer except laptop/netbooks) was that you had a pretty good range of choice when it came to picking out parts for your system. 

Intel's Pentium II design changed that, and it has remained an issue ever since.  You can no longer install a processor made by AMD on a motherboard designed for Intel processors, and you cannot install an Intel processor on a motherboard designed for AMD processors.  Furthermore, because Intel patented its Slot 1 design, it ensured that AMD or Cyrix could not copy the architecture on their own boards (although AMD did eventually create a slot based architecture of their own called Slot A).  It also forced both AMD and Cyrix to create processors for the aging Socket 7 architecture that could not really compete with the Pentium II processor (and indeed it was not until the Pentium III processor that AMD had finished the competitive Slot A design, by which time Intel was returning to the socket architecture).  The Cyrix brand eventually vanished as it was significantly inferior to AMD and Intel, and is presently part of the VIA embedded processor line.

Intel also during the Pentium II phase of development released the first "affordable" series of Celeron processors with the idea of capturing the market that had been dominated by AMD and Cyrix.  The original Celeron processors had no cache and were practically useless - they could not perform as well as a socket 7 AMD processor of similar rating.  On the second series of Celerons, however, Intel made a development breakthrough.

To compensate for the performance failure of the first series Intel added 128k of cache directly to the die on the Celeron processor, as compared to the 512k cache on the Pentium II slot card that held the die.  While it seemed that this would make them perform worse than a comparable Pentium II processor, the reverse was true.  The Celeron 300MHz processor with 128k cache performed better than a Pentium II processor for less than half the price.  Furthermore, the Celeron 300MHz processor could be overclocked and remain stable at 450MHz (which at that time was staggering based on the price of available Pentium II 450MHz processors).

So inadvertently Intel stumbled across what I consider a massive design improvement that not only made their processors perform better, but also less expensive to manufacture.  Did Intel embrace their happy accident?

Quite the opposite - apparently fearing that their high end (and lucrative) Pentium II line would ultimately be abandoned by the marketplace, Intel crippled all later releases of the Celeron processor, rendering them unable to be overclocked (or at the very least extremely difficult to overclock).  This on-die cache would not show up in the Pentium line until the revision of the Pentium III from Slot 1 architecture to socket 370.

This brings me to my next and more significant beef with Microsoft, because to be blunt, I am not pro-overclocking.  With today's computer speeds especially, there's really no point in reducing overall life of the entire computer system for a few extra frames per second in your favorite video games, which is the only significant benefit that I see.

Socket 370 was created for the next series of Celeron processors, notably known as the Celeron IIs.  These processors really needed no card because they still had the 128k cache on the die.  Microsoft engineered the socket 370 architecture for these processors with the promise that the motherboards with a 370 socket would also support future versions of the Pentium III processor.  This was true only in name - the Pentium III socket 370 processors required a "flip chip" socket 370 motherboard.

The term "flip chip" refers to the fact that Intel reversed the pin arrangement on the Pentium III socket 370 processors as compared to the Celeron II socket 370 processors - they literally appeared to have turned the processor over and placed the pins on the opposite side.  Why do this?  To ensure that customers who wished to purchase a Pentium III socket 370 processor would also be forced to purchase a new motherboard to support it.

Why was I so upset about this?  Because during this time I was busy custom-building computers for the company I worked for and I sold them to customers with the idea that they would be able to easily upgrade from a Celeron processor to a Pentium III when the new series was released.  Intel's white lie made me look like a liar to my customers.  I don't forget these sort of things.

There are more issues that have caused me to just shake my head at Intel over the years.  The frustrating part is that no matter how much I dislike them I cannot ignore the fact that in general they tend to produce superior quality computer equipment - just so long as you don't purchase the least expensive things they produce.  Intel wireless network cards are among the best around.  Pentium processors are very reliable, and rarely fail - if they do fail it is typically due to other hardware failure such as power supplies and cooling.  Intel motherboards are typically solid as well.  So while I dislike their business practices, I cannot entirely discount their technology.

This brings me to MSI Computers.  MSI was one of the first companys when the Slot A architecture for the first series of AMD Athlon processors was released to put together a motherboard with an AMD chipset. AMD is a processor that I've long used in my computer systems - almost exclusively.  My first processor upgrade from the Pentium 100 was an AMD K6 200MHz (comparable to the Pentium 200 MMX).   I followed that with an AMD K-6-2 300MHz, followed by a K-6-2 366MHz - all supported by the same motherboard, mind you.  These were socket 7 processors, so I was truly psyched when I got to switch to the Athlon architecture in my own machine.  My MSI Slot A motherboard supported the 400MHz Athlon I started with, and also permitted me to use an AMD Athlon 800MHz processor I traded it for later on down the road.  That system lasted me a long time - roughly five years (which is two more years than most computer systems last these days).

MSI is also the manufacturer of the first laptop I purchased for myself - although it was rebranded by the Medion corporation.  Likewise, this laptop has held up well, although the hard drive and power adapter have needed to be replaced.  It survived our exodus from New Orleans post Hurricane Katrina, which also says something.

My current desktop computer has an MSI motherboard supporting a dual-core AMD Athlon processor, with an AMD chipset as a nod back to my first Athlon based system.  It's served me well and has built-in safeguards - when the fan on my video card stopped spinning and the card temperatures reached critical, my system turned itself off to prevent hardware damage.  This was a function of both the video card and the motherboard.

So the MSi Wind was my first choice in netbooks primarily because I have had so much experience with the MSi brand - not just personally but also in my line of work as a computer repair tech - it tended to be my motherboard of choice whenever possible.  Best value - reliable yet not as expensive as other brands boards within a similar series - but not bottom of the barrel either.

The Wind was also my first closed MSi system - so I was in for a bit of a shock when I realized it had a Warranty Void if Tampered sticker on the bottom.

Warranty void stickers are a thing of the 90s.  PC manufacturers used these on computer systems because they typically sold for well over a thousand dollars, and in many cases could cost about a thousand dollars in parts alone.  If they were going to honor a warranty, it had to be because of actual part failure, not because the computer's owner got curious and started poking around inside his/her system.

When we're talking about a computer that I purchased for $300 - it is unlikely that this machine cost MSi  more than $200 to build.  So the only reason I can see for them to include such a sticker is to reduce the number of warranties they would need to honor - because let's face it - two common things people do with their laptop computers is upgrade the RAM and replace the hard drive if it starts to fail.  These are relatively simple repairs with most laptop computers, the MSi Wind included.  The sticker makes these repairs more difficult - you can't just take your system to a local repair center because I guarantee nobody has a local MSi authorized warranty repair center - it HAS to be shipped to the manufacturer.

So...where am I going with all of this?  My initial reaction was to violently swear off anything to do with Intel - because the Wind has an Intel Atom series motherboard, and because the noisy fan issue affects many different brands it is obviously a design flaw that points to Intel in terms of their cooling options.  I could be wrong in this assessment, however, because after disassembling the system to initiate the repair I realized that the fan is not directly mounted to the motherboard - it is an independent cooling unit.

MSi Computers, however, has struck me hard with the blow of their idiocy.  I seriously doubt that I will be purchasing their brand of computer electronics again in the near future.  I also do not recommend the MSi Wind based on the warranty sticker alone - even if there was no issue with the fan this would still be a problem.

So there you have it - my thoughts in full detail on this debacle.