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Posted on Tuesday 7th of August 2007 at 09:01 in The Internet

Why you will pay more for a laptop with Windows removed

I experimented back in March with obtaining a Laptop that didn't have Windows installed; what followed was a rant when Acer asked ?50 more for the pleasure of not having XP/Vista bundled in. Well, here's why.

It's something known as "desktop real estate". Basically Dell (for example) will be selling you a ?450 laptop for ?400 because the deal they have with Microsoft covers the overlap. This means that more often than not it'll cost more for you to receive a laptop that doesn't have Microsoft products on it that it would with them.

The logic that's hard to get your head around
I found it hard to comprehend that a ?400 laptop with a ?70 Operating System on it means that if you remove the O/S then the laptop is valued at ?330? Unfortunately not. But it's a hard concept to fully appreciate because it doesn't correlate well to every-day life.

Say you want to buy a sandwich, the baker tells you it's ?2 for a big beef sandwich. You ask them to take the beef out; meaning all you're buying is the bread. You wouldn't want to pay more for less would you? Or even the same? I didn't think so - and that's why this whole notion is so hard to grasp.

I guess we just have to wait for Dell to widen their range before things become a bit more sensible. As I blogged previously; getting manufacturers to remove the O/S means you're no better off. You *can* get refunded for the operating system but you seem to pay for the joy of getting it uninstalled - all of this time the laptop is out of your hands. So anyway, that's why it costs more. Upsetting - yes. Avoidable - not yet. Bah.

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Comments

Showing most recent 2 of 2 comments

I just bought a system from Tiger Direct. I bought one with XP because I was told that if I bought one with Vista and then removed it, that voids the warranty.
Margaret
Taking your sandwich analogy (teehee: anal.. *ahem*) on, if you went somewhere where they made fresh sandwiches right in front of you, yes you could easily expect it to be cheaper to not have an expensive component like beef in your order...

However, to more accurately represent Acer in this case, the sandwiches are batch made at the beginning of the day. To sell you a beefless sandwich, they have to remove the beef which takes time. There’s also a question looming over their head as to if they can reuse that beef.
Oli