Perhaps there is another, more direct way of putting it: if a vendor 
represents that their system has ECC RAM and that it works and is 
turned on by default, and that turns out not to be the case, then the 
vendor has committed fraud upon his customers. The first-level tech 
support people may not understand that concept, but you can bet that 
once you get high enough up the chain, you will find someone who will 
be highly motivated to make this problem go away before it turns into 
either a criminal case or a class action lawsuit.

Who buys systems with ECC RAM? I'd guess it'd mostly be high-end 
server customers: financial institutions, hospitals, etc. You pay 
extra for that because you want reliability. That's also typically 
where the high profit margins are, too.

On the other hand, it would be a very good idea to test the hardware 
carefully to make sure that you're in the right before throwing 
around fraud accusations. If you induce RAM errors, are they detected 
and corrected? If not, why not?

	Erik <fair@netbsd.org>