| Assuming I'm getting the store correctly, yes. The trick is that
| memory is an easy thing to swap out, chipsets are very difficult to
| swap. This is a $20 bandage vs. a $200+ solution.
|
Exactly. Just like a big company to put a bandage on a sore that needs
stitches. They aren't fixing anything, they are just covering it up. It's
about like buying a brand new car as new with bondo in it because it was
wrecked on a test drive.
Well, I've done a bit more looking and it seems like I may have been
too quick to judge Intel, it looks like it could well be that it's a
"flaw" in the modules themselves, or perhaps more to the point, the
way that Intel chipsets expects the memory modules to handle the
"self-refresh" feature is somewhat different to how the memory modules
implement self-refresh. Unfortunately finding exact details is
somewhat tricky.
To be fair to HP, they seem to be doing the right thing here. This
exact same flaw will almost certainly also affect Dell laptops (since
HP and Dell laptops are mostly produced by the same Taiwanese
companies, just with different badges thrown on the front), and most
likely Toshiba, IBM and others. It seems like a flat out
incompatibility with Intel chipsets and memory modules from Samsung,
Infineon and Winbond. A separate but similar issue was also found
with Micron modules. Considering that those companies probably
account for 75%+ of the OEM memory module market and ALL the major
OEMs have products using the Intel mobile chipsets in question, this
is a pretty much industry-wide issue.