Windows 10: Italian Judge Says Pre-Installing Windows on New PCs Is...

Couldn’t agree with you all the more. Others state it well thinking along these lines also.

Not sure of the rest of the world, but most judges here have a law degrees and licenses to practice. They are not lawmakers. They are there to carry out the law. If HP was following Italian law as it stands, then the judge had no right to rule this way. This is referred to as legislating from the bench.

Nor for the most part are judges economists with business degrees. This will do nothing more than add cost to the consumers. They would all have to be “customized purchases". In this case when one buys a computer, then one orders which OS will be loaded. This is against all principles of Ford’s assembly line to keep costs down. You can bet that retailers will charge more and rightfully so, for I believe the more licenses one buys the less expensive they are. Retailers can't and won't buy as many licenses as do an OEM. Then there's the labor aspect.

As others stated, things are listed on the box by law. If anything, law should be that they have to list the price of each component, whether it be tangible or intangible. Hardware and software. That clarifies it more to protect the consumer/citizen.

Then where is the line drawn? Technically they would have to list all what? > 3,000 components (estimation) with prices of each included in a computer, both hardware and software. Ridiculous you may think? Yes it would be!

Again, what a crock. I see this more as political power move than anything else. Give some irresponsible people some power and it goes to their head!

Perhaps CountMike's statement makes most sense. Preload any OS to prove it works. In this case an unlicensed, inactivated Windows. Then it's the consumers' responsibility to purchase the license and activate. For the most part this could be performed online or via the phone. In some cases via a B&M store.

It's certainly going to be interesting to see this all unfold.

 

One thing here is sure, there's so many free copies of windows used here. MS was very nice to open an office here and make a gift of many licenses to schools, universities and NGOs. MS office here was authorized to give some number of licenses to their customers and suppliers. Late 1990s and begining of this century MS even distributed windows to some opposition political parties. When you take into account fair number of illegal, cracked ("cured" as they are known locally) windows, normal, retail versions, most of them "home" versions is not too large. Given lo average salary, it's not surprising XP is still predominant Windows and Linux runs rampant. only a bit more of 50% households have a desktop computer and even from that number a lot of them are practically ancient and capable of Linux or XP only. Most of the younger population prefer smart phones and tablets anyway and use desktop or laptops mostly at schools.
Couple of years ago, a friend of mine brought his daughter, she was 12 or 13 than and she was texting to herself on two phones, from one to other. When I asked why, she said "Practicing".
It's not all bleak though, last year export of software exceeded food exports and stores are pretty well stocked with computer parts as sale of ready made, brand name desktops is practically non existent, with Apple having only one store and no regional office.

 

In my time I've specified thousands of PC's, most of which were custom builds, from Dell, HP, Compaq, and Siemens, the vast majority were specified without an OS, these units were for industrial use, and would often run exotic bespoke operating systems, or older windows versions which were essential to run software or data acquisition hardware.

All of these units were tested before despatch and certified, the manufacturer simply used a pre formatted HDD which was replaced with a blank HDD for shipping

Of course we were responsible for ensuring that the software we needed actually ran on the hardware

 

A live linux on a stick can do that nowadays, to say nothing about Live Win8.

 

Except run your software unfortunately. I need windows and rather bizarrely need to define a US keyboard as well for one (IBM) program I use as it simply fails with a French one.

 

I meant for testing purposes.

 

I don't mind the OS being pre-installed. The judge should turn his attention to the manufacturers not to install crapwares. It greatly affects the performance of any PC.

No manufacturer should be allowed to use any hard drive space I paid for except for the OS and drivers of course.

 

Get yourself a Surface Pro 3. No extra junk installed at all. The judges point was that the OS was crapware as well which is going bit far as you'd hopefully be aware if you had bought an OS or not.

 

I am just speaking my mind with regards to the issue.

 

Just another E.U. judge making decisions about things he/she knows nothing about.
It is simple to me.
If you don't want a new computer with Windows on it don't buy a computer with Windows installed.

If you buy a 4 door car and decide you don't want the seat in the back. Then just take the seat out.
No your not going to get a refund because you remove the back seat because you don't want it.
That is the way the car comes. The car dealer will take the seat out for you but you will still have to pay for it. That is the way the damn comes. Take it or leave it.
It's just another E.U. country taking a stab at a U.S. company.