Ryccardo

Yep - I think it's mostly people who go by word of mouth and don't know about the leading free-without-cracks alternative, but RAR does still have some genuine merits like [native] optional redundancy!

You might be interested to know that Volkswagen's newest CNG cars do exactly that - there's a multi-year countdown configured at the factory, and when it runs down you can't use that fuel anymore, just the gasoline fallback!

That's particularly "fun" here in Italy, where (unlike in the rest of Europe), metal cylinders currently need to be removed from the car and sent to one of two national inspection centers for high pressure testing - which requires them to be empty, of course!

And unlike the oil change reminder, you can't reset it with just a button press, you need a computer interface (for which there's a fair amount of competition, but the cheapest for personal use seems to start at 60 € before shipping and is a "cloud" service)

At least with my HL-1112 (bottom-barrel model in 2015) and MFC-L2700DW (entry level all-in-one with decent, albeit aftermarket, multiplatform support) it's trivial to manually reset the levels once you know the button sequence - don't even need a retail cartridge with the mechanical "unused toner" spinner!

That said... yeah, who knows what they're up to, 5 years later?

Yes - well, EFI updates (you get, non-sarcastically, to guess at the reason for this design choice, but as a matter of fact it only supports the "EFI capsule" system popularized by AMI's Aptio and Insyde's H2O)

Anyway, if you're running Win8+ in EFI mode you'll see "Firmware" in Device Manager, which just like any other "device" in the list can have its "driver" upgraded, this unsurprisingly being a special case of driver: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/b...

And yes, if you know how commercial PC firmwares are made [cooperation between CPU/chipset maker and firmware corporation, who then sells the semi-finished product to the motherboard manufacturer - most famously "To be filled by O.E.M." :P ], some times it goes wrong, namely when two different designs get the same ID like the generic default: https://web.archive.org/web/20170101104905/http://www.minixf... (scroll down to post 10)