Was NOT expecting a happy ending.

I don't know if the part of MSI Center with the pipe vulnerability is automatically installed on desktops but this is the terribly written software that you need to turn off all the obnoxious lights on your MB and DRAM.

Why bother reporting to them ?

You could just as well sell it to third parties if it doesn't interest them.

It left me thinking maybe the patch introduced a different vulnerability that’s still under an embargo :)

As my work develop is focused on macOS and Windows apps, I need a Windows laptop and got a light Prestige 13 inch with 32GB and 125H.

It did the trick, but I had years of not understanding how the throttling works. Sometimes if I was using AC and battery was lower than 90% I had CPU throttled at 800Mhz or even 400Mhz never going over 1Ghz. it drove me nuts and my fiddling with MSI Center was always unexpected. I had some strange steps to like connect/disconnect charger, change MSI Center performance settings. none was reliable. (even with Windows Power Settings all the way to max)

Eventually I've found on a reddit thread this (strangely hidden) uninstaller: https://www.msi.com/faq/9934 https://download.msi.com/uti_exe/nb/CleanCenterMaster.zip

Leaving the throttling and fan to Microsoft + Intel seems to do much better work. I no longer look at the task manager for CPU frequency. it just works.

So I have no clue what are the advantages of MSI Center in the first place (maybe bios updating?)

It was formally deprecated in 2018 and has been surpassed in just about every single way by AES long before that.

At this point I feel like it's use is such a huge red flag

If your only goal is to stop users from doing what they want on the hardware they own, you are everything that is wrong with the "security" industry today.

Eh

Shrug.emoji