Although I might be taking the risk of boring you to death with this issue, I would like to report even more on Intel's MTH reboot/hang issue. The situation has come so far that it starts to involve me personally and I won't let Intel get away with that.

Bad Information Policy = Official Intel Policy?

Since the MTH-announcement was made and the press releases went to the press, Intel has been trying to do a nice job to look good officially. We, the press people, know that Intel is planning to handle it this way: "The replacement option will include an Intel VC820 Desktop Board and 128MB of RDRAM. Details of replacement availability will be communicated to your place of purchase in the near future. " We have also been assured that every owner of an MTH-motherboard will get a replacement or refund if he should want that. You, the readers, read a different information at Intel's website "Intel Corporation today announced that it would replace motherboards that have a defective memory translator hub (MTH) component that translates signals from SDRAM memory to the Intel 820 Chipset. " How can you find out if your MTH is one of the 'defective' ones? Well, you basically can't, and you wouldn't have to, because in fact every owner of an MTH motherboard is entitled to a replacement or refund, even though Intel's official announcement sounds a bit different. I got tons of mails from upset owners of Intel CC820 motherboards, who told me that Intel-officials deny the replacement or refund categorically. The answers of those official Intel-spokespeople go from "We won't replace any memory" to "Only affected CC820 boards, which is about 15-20% of them, get replaced". Both statements are simply WRONG. Now if those kinds of comments were the sad exception, I wouldn't really say anything. However, this denial of proper support for the customers who are officially entitled to a replacement/refund seems to be the rule right now. Customers seem to believe Intel-people more than me and amongst other disbelieving emails I've even received a super-rude one from a 3dfx-style fanatic Intel-follower, which you might want to read if you don't mind verbal diarrhea. I advise you to NOT read this mail if you get offended by foul language, but I'd still like to make a point of what ridiculous insults a journalist is facing when he is reporting the truth, only because Intel doesn't feel like instructing its personnel properly or at least quick enough. Click here if you should indeed want to read the mail. I feel slapped by Intel personally, because I would not have to face stuff like that if Intel was a tiny bit consequent. Seemingly Intel was unable to instruct its entire support team in time, so that initially many concerned owners of MTH-systems got falsely rejected. It would save Intel a boatload of money if those people should have given up, and customers that were rejected once will most likely not ever try again. Good for Intel, bad for the customer.