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Dell Refunds Vista/Works With Two Emails

Posted by kdawson on from the try-this-at-home dept.

look@thealternative.ch writes "Although many people have asked for pre-installed Linux, and Dell seems to have listened, some still think that buying a naked PC won't be easy. But what about stripping it naked after you buy it? I managed to get Windows Vista (and a bit more) refunded from Dell Germany last week. The process was surprisingly simple: 1) After delivery, ask Dell Support for refund by email. 2) ??? 3) Refund!!! Read the full email conversation in the original German or my English translation. For the impatient reader: The refund is €77.54 for Windows Vista Home Basic plus Works 8.0 (that is 15% of the total amount I paid). The whole process took 2 emails, 2 more to say thank you, and less than 48 hours. The money is already in my account. Kudos to Dell Customer Care (esp. 'Veronika') for being efficient and customer-oriented!"

12 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. Great ! by BESTouff · · Score: 4, Insightful

    77 for Vista OEM is acceptable. Now, make that not an accident but a regular refund, and explain hos to do it elsewhere than in Germany, and I'm sold.

    1. Re:Great ! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Fuck off with your "US site" bullshit. This is an international site that happens to be in English. That person made a punctuation mistake, but that's no reason to come over all imperialist on us you Yankee piece of crap.

      Someone has insecurity issues. The dude was joking.
    2. Re:Great ! by sgbett · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Not all European locales use the comma as the decimal indicator. The UK uses the decimal point (or period if you prefer!) ...

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    3. Re:Great ! by zsau · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Not all locales use the period as the decimal indicator. Europe uses the comma ...

      Simple solution: When writing in French or German, use a comma. When writing in English, use a dot. You wouldn't use German or French quotation marks when writing in English would you?

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    4. Re:Great ! by Stewie241 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      nah... I like yyyymmdd too, because there is logic to it.

      If I use this naming convention in my files, they sort very easily. But if you do DDMMYY, then you get all the files for the 25th on the same day, which isn't chronological order.

  2. Sounds good by cdrdude · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That sounds nice an all, but it's in Germany. How about other places? Is German Dell an anomaly here?

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  3. An amazing concept called... by bluemonq · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...trust. For now, anyways.

  4. TFA forgets step zero by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Step zero is to buy from Dell in Europe, not in USA. European consumer protection is far better than in USA.

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  5. Re:The best part by Tim+C · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If you haven't activated Vista yet, I assume that it will no longer be possible to do so (and so the most you could use it for is about 120 days with registry hacking). If you have activated it, I imagine that WGA (or similar) will kill it soon enough.

    (Oh, and it was €77, so more like $100 or so)

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  6. Re:You must be mistaken... by teh+kurisu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You mean slashdot.org.uk? Or slashdot.de? Funnily enough, it's not slashdot.us either...

  7. Re:Automation by mpcooke3 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Microsoft might be concerned that they don't get their money for this, but then again it would be against the law for them to do anything like force Dell not to do it

    All they have to do is decrease the discount they give dell on OEM copies of Windows to bring them back into line. They can give any number of reasons for doing this because the agreement would be confidential. This is already how they get Dell to "Recommend Windows".

  8. A Mac without Mac OSX? by Orion+Blastar · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Really any PC system can run Linux or *BSD Unix, you don't need Mac hardware for that.

    The only reason for buying a more expensive system like a Macintosh computer would to be to run Mac OSX on it. Otherwise you can buy PCs with the same hardware cheaper from other vendors sans an OS and install Linux or *BSD Unix whatever on it.

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