Today it boiled over with some severe problems with Keysight products...... just want to warn you about some possible issues.
Keysight 34470A has one bug I have tried Keysight to correct it without any success. The local Finnish and Swedish support seems to be totally useless and they can't make anything about this (tried 6 months). This DMM has severe current measurement waveform distortion issue if you overrange part of the signal. It has 1:10 current ranges and sometimes you have to saturate some part of signal to see the lower parts of the signal. This however causes the hardware or software integrator etc to saturate so severely that the signal stays over the real value long time after signal has come again to measurable range (see picture). This may cause some misleading conclusions when testing.
BenchVue is quite a sad story in my current Windows 10 PC. I was so stupid and didn't test it before purchasing it and now I have a pile of non-functional crap on my PC. First version of BenchVue DMM worked quite ok but it has amazing amount of just ridiculous bugs in it. For example in waveform it showed to measurement at the same time stamp (ie. infinite rise time). After a update this was removed but much more bugs was introduced. This time software scaled time scale quite randomly 1:2. This caused me one day delay in project because I tried to find bug in software...... In every measurement session this software created some tens of errors because software is constantly sending wrong and illegal commands to the instrument. After one automatic Windows 10 update this full BenchVue and DMM stopped working at all. It halts totally at start-up. Don't have time to fight anymore. Today I tried to remove the full software from my computer and now the License manager refuses to remove or transfer the license at all.... Now I have given up, I won't use any more time to try get this junk work. It is time to accept the loss of money.....
Next frustrating issue was when I purchased new/refurbished MSOX-3104T. After spending tons of money I realized that all forums are full of discussion about the flash-problems in these scopes. Now, every time I start this I have to be afraid if it doesn't start this time..... Luckily I have some old reliable Hewlett-Packards and Agilents on my lab.
As a final conclusion: It is quite sad how difficult it is to get some really good, easy to use quality stuff these days. With the nearly unlimited technical capabilities companies are making low quality crap.
You are correct, BenchVue is of horrible quality and should be free.. It used to be.. The way it is now, they would have to pay ME to use it..
I apologize but I have to adamantly disagree with some of your other statements. You are using an instrument deliberately outside it's specifications, overloading it and possibly even damaging it and than state Keysight is crap because, while you are abusing an instrument, measurements are not in specifications...
It is almost the same as saying: "Keysight is making crap, just the other day I burned my display trying to put out a cigarette, for the money I would expect them to put glass there, so I can use it as an ashtray....". Once you are using it outside specs and intended purpose, all bets are off.
Flash rot is a documented problem with 2000/3000A and 4000A series... Since 3000T is basically based on 4000A series, in theory it might have problems too.. But as Steve said, we have yet to see one that was bricked.
I don't know if that is because they fixed underlying hardware source of the problem, or because of those scopes having newer firmware that has a fix in it in a first place.
Regards,