HP to Allow MediaSmart Server Memory Upgrades Without Voiding Warranties

After months of discussion and feedback from the home server community, HP have today announced a change to all existing and future HP MediaSmart Server warranties which will permit the upgrading of RAM without voiding that warranty. You’ll remember that we reported that HP were investigating various options to enable this earlier this month.

A statement from HP reads as follows:

Based on customer feedback, HP will now offer a path for consumers to upgrade the memory on the HP MediaSmart Server without voiding the hardware warranty.  HP customer feedback and research shows that some customers are installing multiple add-ins and/or additional software to the MediaSmart Server, which can lead to a need for additional memory.

Details

Upgrading the memory, in and of itself, will not void the warranty on the MediaSmart Server.  Damage to any part of the MediaSmart Server during the upgrade may violate the warranty, however, leaving the cost for repairs the responsibility of the customer.  Customers should perform a backup to an external device before adding additional memory.

HP is only providing information on a customer memory upgrade path at this time, and customers will not be able to send their MediaSmart Server to HP to perform the upgrade. Customers may be able to find technical assistance for the memory upgrade, however HP is not recommending or training authorized resellers to conduct the memory upgrade on a MediaSmart Server.  HP has not qualified any particular DIMMs, but compatible memory includes 1GB or 2GB – DDR2 667 MHz DIMMs.  Customers should not upgrade beyond 2 GB of memory. Other than disk drives, HP does not support any other hardware upgrade paths, such as processor upgrades, on the MediaSmart Server.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time discussing this issue with various people at HP over the past year or so, and I’m absolutely delighted that they’ve taken the decision to relax the warranty terms to allow customers to upgrade their MediaSmart Servers as they would any other PC or Server in the home. Clearly, they are protecting themselves against you botching the job, which I think is fair,  but if you follow instructions carefully that you’ll find around the net, and you’re relatively experienced in performing upgrades, you should have no problem.