Fair justice
Good news for all of us, here, among other places. Some Dave Mitchell, a freelance English programmer and sysadmin, who bought a Dell laptop, has managed to get back the money that Dell charged him for the bundled O.S., a Windows XP Home I guess. Mitchell asked for his money (45 GBP) back arguing that he never used and never was going to use that Windows license, and invoking Microsoft’s own EULA for it.
Good for him. That’s something we all should do, Linux users or not. For example, my own HP Pavilion W5080 (I can’t link it, because after less than two years is already out of HP catalog) comes with a bundled Windows XP Home, that I was never going to use. No setup CDs, no manuals, everything stored on a recovery partition on the main hard disk. If you install any other O.S., even from the same family, you’re screwed (spanish link, sorry), you just made your warrant void. Even if your problem has nothing to do with the O.S.
I heartily dislike this solution because:
- I don’t see the reason why I have to pay for an O.S. I’m not gonna use. Moreover, if the O.S. I’m going to use is not free; I have to pay twice for the same concept.
- The computer’s manufacturar has no right to tell me how I must setup my hard disk.
- Usually the recovery partition is bigger than needed. Because of their saving on buying complete Windows licenses, I lose hard disk space.
Let’s hope this catches and more people decides to ask for their money back for an O.S. they’r enot going to use. And it shouldn’t be necessary: manufacturers should realize this and give the customer the choice of preinstalled O.S., if any.
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