Wednesday, August 19, 2009

BIOS locking

One thing that really bugs me is when computer makers lock your computer so that you can only use their add-ons. There is no practical reason for this except for pure greed. Dell does this, HP does this, Occasionally Lenovo/IBM did this.

I recently got an HP mini 1000. There is a mini-pci slot there, you could conceivably add shit like a 3D card. But you cannot, because it is bios locked to only accept official HP parts. Which would be fine if they were reasonably priced, but they are not, and they are also not easy to obtain. I want to throw in a 3G mini-PCI card in there, but no, HP doesn't want me to, they want me to go on a 3 year contract with rogers and pay $600 for a netbook. (When you can get the same deals in the USA on a 2 year contract for .99 cents for the netbook)

If I ever start a company, I won't do shit like this, and shit like this erodes any loyalty you may have gleamed from me. But go ahead, sacrifice longterm customer loyalty for short term profit. It's the American way.

On the bright side, someone did create a bios hack for the sunofabitch, so I could probably be fine regardless, but its the principle of the thing.

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