Traduzione in Italiano alla fine di questo post!
Acer announced they refund Windows if you don’t want it (link to a news in Italian)! This is great news! I was waiting for this moments since years! Also it is a very lucky coincidence since an association which I already helped making their website, Gruppo Trentino di Volontariato, bought an Acer laptop this very last Saturday and luckly enough we didn’t yet push the dooming button “accept the plague windows”. So I already offered with enormous pleasure to work out the refund process. In fact it is not too easy, nor too advantageous from an economic point of view: you have to send the laptop you bought to their central assistance office in Milan (cost of transport and insurance is on you), then they simply format the hard disk and send you back an empty (clean I should say!) laptop (cost of transport and insurance is again on you). And how much do they refund for Windows Vista?
Vista Home Basic 30 euros
Vista Home Pro 50 euros
Vista Home Business 70 euros
Vista Home Ultimate 90 euros
It is really a small amount of money, especially of you consider you have to pay for sending the laptop to the assistance center and back, but I don’t do it for the money, I do it because I want Acer and all the laptop producers know there a lot of people who don’t want Windows preinstalled on their machines. I often said “I would buy a laptop without Windows even if it would cost 200 Euros more” so here there is my chance. And I also hope that in this way all the laptop producers can start imitating Dell which already sells computers with Ubuntu GNU/Linux installed on them. And we can put an end to the cancer that stopped innovation in computer science in the past 10 years (at least!), yes I’m referring to Microsoft (some time ago Ballmer was using the term cancer referring to Linux).

Acer might have changed its policy after being ruled by a judge in France to cough up €811 in damages to Antoine Gutzwiller over a €599 laptop because of a dispute over pre-loaded software (windows, MS Works, PowerDVD, Norton Antivirus, …)

I don’t think we are asking too much: we simply ask freedom of choice in which operating system we want on our machines. As simple as freedom.

This is great news.
I’ll keep you posted about the progress, at the moment the laptop is in the Acer offices in Milan.

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Italiano

Acer ha annunciato che ora rimborsa Windows se non lo si desidera. Come fare ad ottenere rimborso? Devi spedire a Acer il portatile acquistato (entro 30 giorni), loro lo formattano e poi ti restituiscono gli euro (Vista Home Basic 30 euros, Vista Home Pro 50 euros, Vista Home Business 70 euros, Vista Home Ultimate 90 euros).
Ho fatto domanda di rimborso e spedito il laptop e scrivero’ su questo blog come e’ andata appena ho notizie.
Perche’ farlo? In modo da far sapere ai produttori di hardware che non vogliamo Windows preinstallato sulle nostre macchine. Vogliamo semplicemente la possibilita’ di scegliere, niente di piu’.