As it may be certain companies fixing (or not fixing) the problem, your assumption that it was done to save money is incorrect. the problem is new materials that are being worked with in the industry now. ati, via, and intel could very well have had the same problem, and likely did. it's just that when you bottle up a hot gpu in a system with almost no airflow comes the problem. If your system has good airflow and if you would have updated the firmware you'd likely still have a nicely working laptop. and yes Dell did release a firmware fix, they were the first of the 'major manufacturers' to do so. On the other hand, you also have third party tweak tools that would have fixed the problem as well. Don't get me wrong, i'm not saying it's not a bad thing here, but it only arose due to lack of cooling, and nvidia really has nothing to do with that unless you bought an nvidia branded card, not a 3rd party manufactured card. There are pleanty of systems that have the affected GPU's in them, that are working just fine because the air flow is properly adjusted. But you don't hear about those because people won't state their opinions in unison unless to complain. The short of what i'm getting at... the mfg's of particular cards had underwhelming cooling solutions, hence why it's mostly affecting laptops. If you don't believe me then go ahead and do the research.