It has been a few years since flaws in Nvidia's mobile GeForce 7000-series and 8000-series chips caused overheating problems, prompting users to send laptops back en masse to manufacturers. Laptop users of almost all makes were affected - Dell, HP and Compaq, Apple, and Sony. Nvidia first admitted to this problem back in July of 2008, then they were hit with a securities lawsuit in September of that year for continuing to supply defective chips to manufacturers despite knowing about problems with the packaging material used for cooling the chips.
After two years, the case came to a close earlier this year as Nvidia began paying out settlements to those affected. As Electronista reports, some were not too amused by what the only option was: a Compaq CQ-56 notebook. Some owners filed a complaint, stating the replacement laptop's specifications do not adequately match that of their affected machines. For example, for two affected GPUs, the Nvidia GeForce 8400M and 8600M, both outperform the Radeon 4250 HD on the CQ-56. For users of Macbook Pros, the gap becomes wider when one factors in the CPUs between the two machines. And finally, some users have Mac applications that they can't use on their replacement machine, which runs Windows 7.
All these objections were considered "without merit," in a ruling by Judge James Ware. He maintains the machines "meet or exceeds nearly all of the specifications," and any extra missing components can be added on. He also maintained an "advanced" operating system such as Windows 7 was good enough, software incompatibilities aside. With this ruling, one has to wonder if it was a better option to simply hand a monetary reimbursement for one to use towards a new system purchase of their choice.
Thanks presence06 for the tip on the forums!
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