I remember I did it in the past with Dell (super cool company), and even with Acer.
In Italy you are entitled about 100€ back (and the law is pretty strict) anyhow.
[1] "Microsoft once assessed license fees based on the number of computers an OEM sold, regardless of whether a Windows license was included." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows [2] The case in question concerned software bundling of Internet Explorer, but it's not hard to imagine eventual attention towards OS bundling of Windows itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
In last september I bought Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 without any OS preinstalled for around $100 less than the exactly same model with Windows.
Because Windows is like "force sold" in combination with buying the hardware, where the hardware is a general purpose computer and that there is no reason you can't buy the hardware without and not pay their unnecessary tax to Microsoft.
Now, even if it is not very public, it is well known, and even if you can't buy most computers alone, you can still, in all case, ask the manufacturer to reimburse you for the windows licence that don't want to use.
This will work even if you just don't want the new "licence" because you want to reuse an old one, that is perfectly legal.
Something like 8/10 years ago I did the procedure and was given back something like 120/130€ I think, that will give the approximate price for windows that you pay with your laptop purchase....
Normally, a few years ago law should force retailer to display in sticker that part of the price that you will pay for windows for laptop sold with it. But I'm not sure that retailer are really doing it nowadays.
That almost sounds like they made a mistake and didn't realize they weren't supposed to refund that much. The OEM keys sold in bulk are not supposed to cost the manufacturer that much.
It's been 26 years since the Windows Refund Day protests and it still isn't particularly common for OEMs to comply with this request, so I'm surprised you were able to do it.
Then I purchased one of those RHEL models as a Windows machine, and got the best of both worlds. It turned out to be quite handy as, during the long service life of that notebook system, the usefulness of Linux on my "desktop" wore extremely thin and I realized that Windows had been right for me all along, so after several years of smoothly running Fedora I was able to fall back to a very very nice, Made for Windows 10 system.
The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option (2022) (tmm.cx)
107 points by wibbily 55 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 33 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43232057
https://blog.tmm.cx/2022/05/15/the-very-weird-hewlett-packar...
I find it so wacky that they didn't just replace the option with a random Linux. Or if it needs to be crippled (so that normal users don't try to use it in that state), coulda just been FreeBSD or something. Anything that boots on modern UEFI, starts at a command line interface, and has no hope of ever supporting Wifi would have accomplished the same goal of technically shipping a computer with an OS but scaring the user away from stubbing their toe on it.
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx1/t...
In fact, over here every brand does it. Even US brands like HP and Dell.
An example = https://www.tokopedia.com/nescomputer/dell-poweredge-t440-xs...
rosseitsa•9mo ago