Two of the biggest and brazen outright liars that plague computer consumers are hard drive and monitor manufacturers. From almost the very beginning they have purposely lied to consumers in order to rip them off and one has to wonder why are they still allowed to do so? It’s like the worst kept secret that they never advertise their products truthfully when mentioning size/ capacity/ specs.

Hard drive manufacturers totally misrepresent the capacity of their hard drives and monitor makers purposely lie about the size of their screens. Hard drive makers tell you that the size of their drives are much higher than they actually are, while monitor makers either count the bezel when measuring their screen or they round up the inches. No matter what they say, hard drive makers are always selling you less capacity while monitor makers are selling you a smaller monitor.

Love that nice huge 1 terabyte drive you just got? It’s not a terabyte drive dude. You just got ripped player!

Hard drive makers are the worst of the lot because the larger the hard drive, the more capacity you get screwed out of. See, if you buy an 80 gigabyte drive, you’re actually getting a 74.5gb drive (a loss of 5.5gb) and if you purchase a 1 terabyte drive, you only get 931gb (a loss of 69gb!). Sucker!

Why? That’s because they use a decimal system where computers use a binary system. 1k in decimal = 1,000 whereas 1k in computers (binary) = 1024. So for each 1k a drive manufacturer reports their hard drive is in size, they’re lying by 24 bytes. And those bytes add up quickly, believe you me!

Monitor manufacturers also rip off their customers by either counting the bezel in their measurements or rounding up the size. The bezel scam was the worst with CRT monitors since the bezel was usually quite HUGE on these heavy puppies. LCDs on the other hand usually do not count the bezel when talking about screen size but round up so there are a ton of 22″ LCDs that are actually 21.1-21.5″ LCDs. Doesn’t sound too bad, but there are other ways LCD makers give you less instead of more. They lie about the response time, brightness, contrast ratio, pixel pitch (sharpness); in short they lie or intentionally mislead (same thing) just about every spec they list.

The biggest scam of LCDs is that it’s perfectly acceptable to the manufacturer that you get a broken monitor with stuck or dead pixels and will refuse to replace your monitor if it’s broken in that way. See, they say that MOST of your monitor works then that’s OK by them and touch luck for you. So what if there are 4 bright white dots (or black ones) on your brand-new 22″ LCD, suck it up, stop crying and get used to it! While there are a tiny bunch that don’t agree with this scam, most manufacturers require you to have a significant amount of problems on your LCD before they’ll even consider replacing it, even though it’s obviously defective.

Which is total ! There is no excuse during the warranty period for there to be any display defects of any kind! But just like hard drive manufacturers who lie about their product every day, LCD makers don’t care if not everything works the way it should, as long as people buy it. These ers have thought this way for far too long!

It’s about time hard drive and LCD makers stopped lying about their products.

What do you feel, people Do you care? Have you ever contacted either industry and told them to knock it off? Because if you all did, they would. So…