MSI's April Fool's Joke Gone Bad..

GenXer

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This is a forum email/ Spam we all got this morning. A follow up email/Spam was generated apologizing for the April Fool's joke email/Spam. The Admin/Mod's seem to think it's a hilarious prank 5 days before April Fools Day. There are some really upset forum members over there. Seems self-destructive to me. I Just wanted to let fellow MSI users know what to expect. No surprises.

I want to thank Tom's Hardware for not going this route. Thanks for keeping it professional. That is what is expected and asked of forum members.



New announcement: RTFM-chip details reveiled!
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Thu, March 25, 2010 5:40:37 PM
From:
MSI HQ User to User Forum <do_not_reply@forum-en.msi.com>
...
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The MSI-forum and MSI-support team are fed-up with explaining you what can be found in the manual.
I mean, come on, how hard is it to read a manual?

They are printed on paper so you see them.

We have been talking to MSI for a couple of years and came up with a solution.
It has been implemented on a few boards for some time and with big success.
It had various names, like CoreCenter (1st gathering tool) upto DrMOS (fully automatic)

Some of you noticed because Windows wanted you to install a driver, but you couldn't find the manufacturer.
On AMD systems this was called the Away-driver.

What you didn't know is this, this driver activates the RTFM-chip. (Re-Turn inFormation to Manufacturer chip)
It means it can detect if you read a manual as well stores the parameters you have set in the BIOS.
As soon as you start Windows we are informed about your settings and manual readings.

As we have been monitoring peoples behavior for some time and combined those with the RMA information from returned boards.
At the same time monitoring questions on the forum and matched the IP's.
We have made a discovery.

A lot of RMA is unneeded and unwanted, many happens due to user mistakes, numbers show that 90% of the RMA is OC people killing boards and
newbies connecting the wrong connectors or insert parts that should not be inserted.
Or simply forget to remove standoffs or CPU-power.
MSI plans on tackles those numbers, and the RTFM-chip will give a readout of what you have done when it did post or attempted to post!

Checking on you isn't new, Homeland-security done this ever you installed XP-SP3 or above, but their info in encrypted so useless to MSI.
So MSI decided to ban people from support, RMA and the forum who has done the damage themselves or didn't read the manual the first of next month.
We know who you are, and we have gathered enough information via our RTFM-chip.

The only question is, should MSI continue to do this? As some information is real bad.
Will this hurt your relation towards MSI products?

Please let us know, as we have to talk to MSI management the first of next month and make them decide what to do with the information.

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You can view the full announcement by following this link:

http://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=136806.0

Regards,
The MSI HQ User to User Forum Team.