Many companies that were involved with the making or selling of motherboards or computer systems with the MTH-chip are currently working hard to establish a replacement or refund policy. Very few companies have succeeded with it yet. One of the commendable exceptions is Hewlett-Packard. Some HP systems of the 'Kayak'-line are affected by the MTH-issue. HP is in the lucky situation that they planned very well. Obviously HP was only using normal i820-motherboards equipped with a special DIMM-riser card that is carrying the MTH and the SDRAM. In these cases only the riser card has to be replaced with a RDRAM RIMM and everything is set; no motherboard needs to be replaced. Click here to get right to HP's announcement.

Isn't Intel Very Customer Friendly After All?

Well, it is certainly worth to ask this question. Let's be honest, many other companies in this business would never even consider such a huge recall action as Intel did this time. Failing VIA chipsets won't make VIA announce that they will replace motherboards and even memory. However, Intel has got much more of a name to lose than VIA has. We can be sure that Intel made the tough decision to publish the MTH-problem after serious considerations. I don't want to speculate why Intel finally felt they had to go life, but I doubt that it's pure philanthropy. At the same time I admit that I was a bit harsh with poor Chipzilla when I stated that they are an unreliable business partner. I guess I've got to use the old German saying "In the world of the blind the one-eyed is king". Unfortunately this saying holds true in most aspects of our life today.

What we should ask however is if Microsoft would ever do anything like what Intel is doing right now. Just imagine Microsoft would recall Office2000 or Windows98 because of all the bugs that you can find in there. I guess we won't live to see that and from this point of view Intel can somehow be commended indeed. However, I can still remember my parents telling me that I shouldn't look at the bad kids, I should take an example of the good kids instead. Good kids don't produce failing chips ... but at the same time nobody's perfect ...