somewhere in Agilent, and engineer is adding an encoded checksum routine to the EEPROM driver library....
I don't think Agilent needs to worry. The skill, knowledge and tools to do this are beyond the ability and motivation of 99.99% of purchasers. They are not going to lose sales over it.
That's totally, totally wrong, though! Think about it, if you're going to own an electronics multimeter that retails for between $200 and $500 US (given all the lines this affects), you DAMN well better at least understand what an eeprom is and how to use it
. Now of course, this PARTICULAR meter is more electrical than electronic, but still. The 1253 line isn't.
Anyway, more to the point, *someone already did,* else there'd be no thread. And the process is easy enough for the meter's target market to follow.
The REAL reason they probably don't need to worry is that hobbyists make up a minuscule fraction of their market, and companies aren't going to start buying the cheaper tool and spending precious employee time hack-upgrading it. Which is, of course, why these tools can command such a high retail price despite being (one can only assume based on complexity) relatively cheap to manufacture and high-margin.