Intel chipsets may contain a flaw!

Last month Intel rolled out its latest computer chipset – the “Sandy Bridge” – at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Recently they discovered a flaw in one of the support chips that will cause hard drives and/or optical drives in affected computers to fail in strange and mysterious ways – but not for 6 to 24 months after purchase!

While Intel is offering free repair or replacement to those who have already purchased defective PCs many of those units may still be on retailers’ shelves or in distribution warehouses. By the time they get delivered, news of the $1 BILLION mistake will have died down and many of the computers will be out of warranty by the time they finally fail. Their owners won’t realize they have a free repair coming from Intel. And even customers do remember the offer, the computer must be returned to Intel and that could be difficult to do if you live in Baja Sur or elsewhere in the world!

If you buy a new PC in the near future, be sure you check the Intel website at:
http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/sb/CS-032263.htm
to make sure you don’t have a bad one!

UPDATE! Both HP and Dell are warning that some of their computers are affected by the Intel chipset problem. HP says only “a small fraction” of its consumer notebooks and laptops used the bad Intel chipset while Dell says four models are affected. One of HP’s models has been shipped to Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Dell offered no specific geographic locations. By their own addmission, more than 8 million bad Intel chipsets have been sold to computer makers since January.