Windows Refund day - reaction

[mherzog at mediaone.net (Matthew Herzog)]

There are so many good reason to avoid the big hardware manufacterers
like Compaq, HP et al. Have a small, local store build up the machine
using only parts you specify, have them run QA Plus for a burn-in period
and then install the OS of your choice at home. Sure you can get a
Presario for a song these days but it won't run NT and probably won't
like Linux either. All the biggies use the cheapest, generic parts they
can get. On-site service is great but not if you need to use it every
month.

Jerry A Clabaugh wrote:

> Windows refund day, Feb 15 (Monday), has been generating an amazing
> amount of hostility on feed-back news sites.  Ziff-Davis ran
> a story with a talk-back section,
> http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2189833,00.html -
> I'm just amazed at the anger and lack of comprehension in most
> of the posts there.  Just today there was a response at LinuxToday
> to an article (http://linuxtoday.com/stories/2985_flat.html)
> which was disturbingly angry.
>
> To me it all seems simple and obvious - you can't buy a pre-assembled
> Intel-based consumer-level machine without paying money to
> Microsoft, whether you want or intend to use any Microsoft products.
> Linux users are the ones most concerned with this, because they
> are probably the largest segment of people for whom this is a
> problem.  But even some NT users don't want to have to pay for
> Win98 when they don't intend to use it.
>
> Why is there such an angry reaction?