Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

They say they didn’t do anything wrong. They didn’t fib about the performance of the Intel Pentium 4 chip (the first generation one, dubbed Willamette), and use inflated benchmark numbers to promote those computers with those chips, for a year or so, more than 10 years ago. Nuh-unh!

All the same, Intel and Hewlett-Packard (HP) want to settle the  claims, and pay off the individuals who are included in a class known as Janet Skold, et al.

You are a member of that class if you bought a computer with a Pentium 4 between November 20, 2000 and December 31, 2001 for personal, family or household use. Or if you bought a computer with a Pentium 4 processor with a speed below 2.0 GHz between January 1,2002 and June 30, 2002, also for personal, family or household use.

People in Illinois are excluded. They’d have to file differently to pursue redress. This case was brought under California’s Unfair Competition Law, in the Superior Court of California for the County of Santa Clara. But it has application in 48 other states, including ours.

This case has been grinding along for 10 years. Finally, after various settlement terms had been suggested by the companies and by the plaintiffs, through their counsel, and rejected, round after round, the trial was about to commence. But the day before Judge Peter H. Kirwan would have banged that opening gavel, counsel announced that they had reached agreement on a settlement.

If you opt into the class that is called Janet Skold et al (if you are part of the alia, the “others” that are meant by “and others”), and file a claim, and that claim is seen as valid when reviewed by the panel looking after the class, you are included in the settlement.

Upon reading this, you may be thinking of all the wonderful things you will do with your settlement. Oh joy! The next emotion you feel is regret. ‘I knew I should have kept those receipts I threw out last year! What was I thinking? That clunky computer has been gone for years—it was running Windows Me, wasn’t it?—but you never know…’

Well, you don’t need a bill of sale or a receipt for that ancient computer with its Pentium 4 for a brain, with maybe not such a super IQ as you thought when you got it. Don’t need the warranty which you forgot to send in.

What you do need is its brand name, model name, if possible, something indicating it was a system with that kind of processor. You need to be able to say approximately when you bought it (a date within the parameters mentioned above), and where or from whom. Like from Dell, or TWIG Systems, or Walmart, or NewEgg. Wherever.

No, the computer you bought does not need to be an HP. HP is a named defendant in the class action because it conspired with Intel in NOT doing that bad thing the plaintiff class said it did. Or at least Intel and HP are together in not admitting any wrongdoing.

You go online here:
IntelPentium4Litigation.com, with the usual www. ahead of it. Poke around and you will find a claim form you can fill in on the screen, and one you can download and print, if you’d rather fill out the hardcopy.

And what will be your reward? You will get $15, for having bought and put up with that computer that you thought would be really fast! All those cycles per second that your processor could not provide that you had counted on it providing! Fifteen lousy bucks, for the time you sat there waiting for things to load and the images to resolve.

But it’s the principle, right? They owe you something!

Alas for me, I can’t join the class. Whenever I had a system built, I specified AMD chips. In that period they were early Athlons.

The plaintiffs asked the court to make Intel and its collaborator, HP, “restore” any ill gotten gains. By “settling out,” Intel and HP do not admit to any wrongdoing. This settlement, if approved by the court, will allow the defendants to maintain that there were no ill-gotten gains—but it cannot be denied that there were gains garnered by those nefarious things they do not admit doing.

Pentium 4 chips sold for more than Pentium III chips. (For some reason Intel changed its nomenclature from using Roman numerals to Arabic ones when it marketed the Pentium 4.)

If there was a faster processor available, the processor maker could charge more for it, and computer makers could charge more for the systems that had the faster chip. Computer makers could market new models that made the existing ones obsolete in terms of performance. Many makers did.

But the Pentium 4 (early editions, as defined in the suit) was poorly designed, a dud. Its performance was worse than that of the reigning Pentium III!

Here is what the plaintiffs do NOT admit having done: setting up a new company seeming to be an independent benchmarking service, and supplying benchmarking software that would make the Pentium 4 look better than the Pentium III or the AMD’s new Athlon; crippling the Pentium III so that it could be said the Pentium 4 was a significant improvement; lobbying the independent press and product reviewing sites such as CNet and ZDNet to use the skewed benchmark results.

Since the defendants can’t actually restore to the actual victims all the extra, undeserved money they got by operating with all their corporate fingers and toes crossed, the court is asked to approve the $15 each to the, er, hypothetical victims, and to put $4,000,000 into a fund to be distributed to nonprofit entities such as Teach for America.

Plaintiff’s attorneys will come in for a nice chunk, to be set by the court, not to exceed $16,450,000. The lead plaintiffs, Skold and David Dossantos, will get $25,000 each for having assisted throughout the prolonged litigation.

It’s a relief to hear Intel and HP assure us there has been no wrongdoing of the kind described, in great detail, in the complaint. Just imagine how much wrong they could have done if they had done it!