Milk the cow until it runs dry

NVIDIA is a Graphics Processor manufacturing company that specializes in making graphic cards and chipsets for Personal Computers around the world. Based in Santa Clara, California ,it raked in close to 5 billion dollars as revenue in the last fiscal year. Such is its dominance in this segment that its monopoly is virtually unchallenged,although another company ATI, a subsidiary of chip maker AMD tries desperately every now and then.

The story goes on.. I am not writing this piece for NVIDIA's glorification but rather am trying to reveal and analyse the opportunistic behaviour of this company due to good faith reposed on them by the public. NVIDIA makes Graphic Cards for both Desktops and Laptops all over the world. In case of laptops the mobile GPUs(Graphics Processing Units) are manufactured by NVIDIA and supplied to various OEMs(Original Equipment Manufacturers) like Dell, HP, Acer, Asus,etc.

The current mobile GPU series is the 9 series which was released 3-4 months back. Regular users of laptops containing the 7 series GPUs experienced intermittent failing of their graphic cards almost ranging from a year ago and is still continuing. When these complaints were conveyed to the respective manufacturers like Dell, HP,etc, they expressed helplessness. In most of these cases, the GPU failed when the laptop was just out of warranty. So users had to shell out almost 350-400 dollars(15k-20k) to get their laptop motherboards replaced. In case of laptops the GPU is soldered to the motherboard. So one has to replace the motherboard itself if it fails. NVIDIA revealed the design problem in its GPUs only around 6 months back and that too only for the 8 series cards. They had a subpar substrate applied to the card during manufacturing which caused these cards to overheat and fail before their expected lifetimes. The following cards have been documented by users to have this problem:

Go 7200,Go 7600,8400M seies,8600M series.

But NVIDIA still refuses to acknowledge this problem in all the cards. Worse of all they have not done a product recall and have kept on masking this problem . In fact they have been quite successful in creating an impression that nothing actually has happened. But the true repurcussions of this calamity can be gauged only by looking at the number of complaints at HP and Dell's consumer forums.

Is there any hope for the thousands of affected customers who have been milked by the respective manufacturers and now have been ignored by means of obnoxious excuses???