Tablet Acer Iconia W500, anyone?

Tim ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au
Thu Dec 1 13:23:44 UTC 2011


On Thu, 2011-12-01 at 04:48 -0300, Fernando Cassia wrote:
> Plus, it would be great to approach Acer about a Windows license refund. :)
> 
> http://linux.vandeplas.com/acer/winrefund.htm

While such notions have appealed to me, in the past.  Having seen the
kerfuffle that you'd have to go through, and the pittance of a refund
that you'll get back, by reading various blogs about it, I don't think
it's worth the waste of your time.

Seriously, how long do you want to spend on phone calls and letter
writing, to get back a measly $30 or so?  I'm not, particularly, a "time
is money" person.  But it'd be a tedious and stressful thing to go
through.

I'd be more inclined if you got a substantial refund, such as how much
you'd have to pay to buy Windows, by itself, over the counter.  Or
amused, if someone managed to knock the retail price down to match the
refund price.

Years ago, I was talking to a shopkeeper about Windows pricing, and he
said as far as he was concerned that it ought to sell for $50, because
that was all he thought it was worth, taking into consideration its
crappiness, and everything you went through to use it (buying antivirus,
all the maintenance you had to do, or get someone else to do, and all
the risks that an infection exposed you to).  At the time, buying
Windows, here, would set you back a few hundred dollars to buy the OS,
outright (*).  Upgrade versions were a bit cheaper.  And those were
Windows-only install discs, not Windows plus applications (like we get
with a Fedora OS *and* installations disc).  Windows plus applications
discs were seriously expensive, or only bundled with new computers.

* When XP was newish, a stand-alone install packaged retailed at over
$700.  I couldn't believe it when I saw it.  Then, on top of that,
buying an Office package was a similar price.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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