31 May
2006
31 May
'06
2:52 p.m.
Hi Georges,
On Wed, May 31, 2006 at 04:21:31PM +0200, Georges Toth wrote:
I'm thinking about buying a thinkpad, and was
wondering how I may buy one
without any m$ product preloaded or included ?
I tried to contact lenovo Belgium, but without much success.
Ouch, that's going to be hard.
A couple of years ago, I spoke to IBM people about this,
essentially they are bound by some sort of contract (which
may or may not be illegal) with MS to sell only with MS
licenses (ok, that was before the Lenovo deal).
You might try to get a refund from MS, but that may be
hard and tedious.
The other variant is to go the very hard but principled
way, i.e. as Brent did: sue them for illegal bundling (they
don't even detail how much the OS costs in the package).
Alternatives:
- pay the MS tax
- accept to buy different hardware (option: tell IBM/Lenovo
why they lost a sale) Some vendors sell without OS at all,
some do even provide some distribution of Linux.
- raise enough of a stink with IBM/Lenovo or one of their
resellers, maybe they'll accept providing you with an
"unbundled" Thinkpad. Don't count on it being any cheaper
though.
Greetings, Eric