If you have read this, and agree that these features should be included, Digg This. The more people that know, the more likely they are to get fixed. Even if you don’t use these features, aren’t they worth having? After all, you paid for it.
That’s right! Yet again PC’s are being intentionally crippled. The first time I heard about this it had to do with Creative’s soundcards being intentionally crippled in Vista. Apparently it was a part of a business deal. Of course someone found out about this and being an intelligent consumer and tech. savvy individual proceeded to modify them. Suffice it to say Creative didn’t like this very much and proceeded to send him the equivalent of a cease and desist letter. There was a multiple page thread in their forums about this very issue but either I can’t find it now or it was deleted. Neither would surprise me very much, especially the latter idea. You can go here for more information on it.
Recently though, I found out Lenovo has been doing the same thing. The original thread regarding this appears to be here but additional information can also be found here. Without getting into too much detail (because it’s too much and I don’t know enough to explain it correctly) it appears that Lenovo and their buddies over at SoundMax have limited sound input and recording to the microphone only. Basically, the only way to record sound on these laptops is through the microphone. Now while there are plenty of legal uses for this ability, the primary one everyone thinks of is sure to be the ability to record streaming music from several internet sites.
It appears this has also crippled the ability to receive audio from external tv tuners. So, congrats Lenovo users! You can now watch your favorite shows in silence. No more worrying about missing spoken words because there are none!
Now at first glance it appears that this would be the work of the RIAA and at some level it probably is, but they didn’t make the cards in the laptops nor do they sell the laptops.
Of course this is the smaller issue here. The real issue revolves around the freedom to do what you want with your property. For a minute, let’s ignore piracy. Lenovo has crippled users ability to perform legal acitivities with the computer they paid a high price for. It’s ridiculous and deplorable that this is allowed to happen without, of course, even an official word from the company.
Now I’m sure this happened a while back. I just found out about it today and thought it worthy of a mention.
For the sake of time and not making this a mile long post I’m going to stay away from the topic of piracy, the RIAA, and anyone else that proceeds to limit the freedoms of computer users.
*Edit* Apparently an admin at the Lenovo Forums has confirmed it’s a hardware issue:
All,Thanks for you patience as this was investigated through engineering. The official answer provided is as follows:“The ‘61 series systems do not have any way to provide the same loopback function or“Stereo Mix” that previous systems have provided. This is by design of the hardware.There cannot be any driver update to enable this function as the hardware layer doesnot support it.”I do not have any more information as to why this feature was not carried forward as a requirement in the development of the ‘61 series ThinkPads, as many members have noted the capability on prior systems in the forum discussion around this issue. I am not aware of any specific reason for the omission.
~Chico
