In Mario Schmidt had this to say:
My reply is at the bottom of your sent message:
Yes but that' s hard to do with laptops. Almost all of them sell with
Windows.
pricewatch.com is nice for that but in the past I've done it a little
differently once in a while - call the manufacturer and order it that way.
Having initials after your name or representing a VAR helps but I've done it
from a straight consumer angle as well.
I eagerly await the day where I can EASILY build my own laptop at a
reasonable cost.
Side note: Acer has always been really good about this from my experiences.
I can call, talk to a rep, ask him/her to immediately transfer me to a level
2 salesperson for a custom order, get the name of the rep and request it
without an OS. In the past it has still shipped (minus the fees though) with
the OS and COA on the side, they just deduct the price. I've made it a point
to call, request to speak with that person, and remind them that they are
still legally entitled to use the key on another system and that I have no
intentions of ever installing the OEM version. Fortunately I get a different
MVP plan for MSDN and other than that I just get the retail version.
Then again, sometimes I'm using Ubuntu on it, sometimes Mandriva but not in
a long time, and sometimes I want to have it just for beta software. I go
through a lot of hardware but licenses? Not so much. I usually save it for a
while, when it is "old" I'll donate it as there's a few charitable
organizations and a low income religious school that does things like
accepting anyone even if they can't really afford it. The cool thing about
the school is they're all standardized on 98 and 2k which is okay as they
were given piles and piles of older PCs that didn't work and a bunch of
licenses when a tech company in the area went out of business.
Ah well, that's enough digression for now I suppose.
--
Galen - MS MVP - Windows (Shell/User & IE)
http://dts-l.org/ http://kgiii.info/
"Chance has put in our way a most singular and whimsical problem, and its
solution is its own
reward." - Sherlock Holmes
