My what a spirited discussion this has become. I just want to
clear up a few potential misunderstandings as the discussion continues.
This is true, if you suffer a hardware failure due to no fault of your own,
ETC is going to do what we can to get you going again as fast as we can. Sometimes that is a re-image kit, sometimes that is a loaner to use while your
console is in for repair.
If you do cause the hardware to fail, we'll still do our best to help you out of the jam that you are in, but of course it certainly wouldn't be covered under warranty and there may be some cost associated.
Steve is right. I can count on one
hand the number of support calls in the last 10 years that I've needed to use the administrative area to solve a problem and none of those were short calls. The most common cause of trouble in that area however is boredom.
You are absolutely able to open them, clean them, and perform regular maintenance on the hardware. In fact, we encourage it. See:
It should be noted that
ETC is not stopping you from doing whatever you want with the hardware that you own. We just can't support changes made to the hardware that we haven't taken into account when designing the product. We take an unbelievably long amount of time to decide on which hardware components that are used in the consoles and we do so with serviceability and longevity in mind. The same goes for software. We spend a lot of time and money on software development and testing to try to make sure that the intended software functions work as expected.
As I said before, if you make changes, you are essentially "jailbreaking" your
console. Your
console's hardware and software are like an ecosystem that has been balanced for optimal lighting control The changes you make may work or they may cause it to fail spectacularly, but because you have decided to make changes that are unsupported, you are responsible for taking the corrective action required when those changes have unintended consequences. Depending on the severity of the change, sometimes the corrective action will require purchasing the tools and/or services needed to
restore the ecosystem. And, often, the biggest cost is time.
A final note on hardware replacement:
When it comes to replacing a drive, we encourage you to order the replacement from
ETC (through your
ETC Dealer) or
send in the
console for repair, not because it isn't something that an end-user couldn't do, but because (as we have painfully discovered) drive quality is a fickle thing and we want to ensure that the physical hardware is going to last.