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Amazon US Refunds Windows License Fee, Too
rrohbeck writes "Today Amazon credited my card with $65.45. After ordering an Eee PC 1005 HA from amazon.com, I asked them for a refund for the cost of Windows XP via the 'Contact us' form. At first they told me to cancel any items on my order that I wanted a refund for, but after I explained that XP was pre-installed on the machine they got it. They asked what the cost of the OS was, and I answered that I had no idea but that Amazon UK refunded £40.00. Within a few hours I got a response saying 'I've requested a refund of $65.45 to your Visa card.' Somehow I doubt that Amazon will charge Asus or even Microsoft, but maybe they will one day if more people do this. Oh, and peeling off the 'Designed for Microsoft Windows XP' sticker is easy, too."
The news about the death of customer service are greatly exaggerated.
Instead of a ~$65 refund, I bet you could peel the sticker off and sell the COA to someone for $100. MS may not like it, but it'll activate on another computer and won't ever fail WGA. You end up with an extra $35 in your pocket, and your friend will have slightly cheaper oem COA. This is especially handy because one cannot buy XP retail anymore.
I did the same with Dell last year when I ordered my XPS M1330. It came with Vista + MS Works (at the time they had no pretend Linux alternative - with lower specs and same price as a Vista laptop).
I wrote to Dell for a refund and enclosed a printed out screenshot (via digital camera) of me ticking the "I reject license" on Vista bootup and another screenshot of Kubuntu running on the laptop.
A month later I was refunded £120 + vat for both Vista and Works. Not bad considering the laptop cost £520 - minus M$ Tax = £400.
It will not activate.
For quite some time now, all major OEMs have been printing "dummy keys" to the COAs. The official method of recovery (a recovery CD or a recovery partition) never asks for the key as the OS is pre-activated. This official recovery method obviously won't install to anything other than the hardware it was shipped with. Usually it is tied to a specific custom BIOS. If you try to install a standard OEM disc with the key found on the COA, you'll find that the installer won't reject it outright (it will allow you to complete the installation) but when you try to activate, it will instruct you to contact Microsoft by phone.
I haven't had experiences with laptops but in cases of desktops you can get MS to issue you a new working key by stating that the PC was repaired and this required a motherboard replacement (hence, you had to use a replacement media and this issue came up). For laptops, not sure what would make MS give you a new key - the license is tied to the piece of hardware it was sold with. You are most likely out of luck and have to contact the manufacturer of the hardware. You could try to bluff the droid on the phone by stating the same thing (motherboard was replaced due to fault) and assume that the key doesn't tell if it was bundled with a laptop.
Before MS and OEMs started doing this, people just wrote down keys off publicly accessible computers and used those to activate standard OEM disc installations. I never quite got the original idea why it was smart to print the valuable product key on a sticker where anyone could snap a picture or write it down, but this was MS we're talking about...
...at least according to this article. The author makes a convincing argument that MS took a bath with that price in order to keep Linux from gaining a toe-hold in the netbook/notebook market, and also credits the threat of Linux Netbook Popularity with the extension of XP to 2010 and modifications of specs on Windows 7. A good read.