this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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I've been largely unaware of a lot of these things going on with Asus but the other day I was reading up on Armoury Crate, which Asus integrates as a hardware-level rootkit on many of their motherboards. That is absolutely goddamn absurd. Bloatware baked right into the hardware itself? I cannot express how scummy and disrespectful to your customers that is.
I'm very glad I picked no Asus parts for my latest build.
I saw this headline and immediately thought "ArmouryCrate is the reason"
I certainly avoid ASUS stuff after discovering that piece of nonsense on my new install.
The rootkit is easy enough to turn off in the BIOS but I highly, highly recommend G-Helper instead of Armoury Crate.
Moving to it from AC is like leaving a prison cell full of screaming children and entering a calm beach.
I didn't even know that. Fuck.
Wtf?
What about MSI? Do they do this shit too?
I had an msi board in my father's build, and as I was eyeing hardware upgrades I decided to get some more life out of it by adding some memory and updating the bios, as it was quite old. After the bios update, it never booted again. The upgrade tool said it was the correct file, that it was installed successfully, and that I just needed to reboot. Their flashback system? Didn't work. Researching, it was apparently a KNOWN PROBLEM that msi just shrugged off, and several boards from that era would die after an update. No apology, no resolution, not even an admission of guilt. Because of that fuck up, proprietary software that my father used for business finances, wouldn't activate on a new machine - the company shutdown the activation servers, and it required hardware checks, and there was no work around. The new program? Unable to read the old file format. We lost access to 20 years of tax/receipt records.
MSI is blacklisted for me, my family, friends, and anyone who I perform IT services for. I don't give 2 fucks if the hardware is 80% cheaper and 200% better. Fuck you, they fucked perfectly good hardware, my reputation, and if we ever get audited we're fucked. Eat shit and die, MSI.
At least it's exclusive to Windows