Written by: < >

Created April 19 2001, modified April 19 2001

I recently bought an ATI video card, the Rage Xpert 2000. I was having some problems with the software and I could not isolate the bugs myself. I consider myself pretty savvy with computers, but I still know that I do not know everything. So the next step was to ask ATI. I cruised over to http://www.ati.com and clicked around to the request support page. I had to download some utility so that I could send a "report" to ATI. After I used their utility I was presented with a document in Notepad. Scrolling the document alarmed me greatly. It seem that ATI wants a little more information about me and my computer than I would even tell my mother. Specifically this is what I found in the report that, frankly, pissed me off:

1) The serial number for my CPU
2) The serial number for my motherboard
3) The serial numbers for the other cards on my computer that this utility could obtain - give them credit that they couldn't get the SNs for all my cards
4) Listing many of my registry keys detailing the hardware and software on my machine
5) If the software stored an SN in the registry it was included with the "report". This also included the line from the registry containing the key for my Windows install
6) My entire WIN.INI, SYS.INI, Autoexec.bat and config.sys

All in all I feel that this is pretty intrusive and it also makes me wonder. How many people have sent this form to ATI without checking out what they are sending?

ATI will more than likely deny some parts of my claims, but I have the entire "report" printed out and am considering what to do about this. I do not think I can take any legal action as they are "asking" for this information to be "voluntarily" sent. BTW I will not send a copy of this report to ATI, I damn sure am not sending it to you.