[PLUG] [OT] laptop with pre-installed popular OS

[Arun Khan]

On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 7:37 PM, Mayuresh <mayuresh at acm.org> wrote:

> To make life possible in presence of such things, I am thinking of buying
> a laptop with the MS OS installed. (Yes, feel humiliated when writing this
> ...)
>
> Just think that if I was anyway buying a new laptop, pre-installed OS will
> be more cost effective than buying the OS separately from market.

Yes, otherwise stick with a FOSS OS.

> If somebody has bought such laptop / or knows anything about following
> points, please do post:
>
> 1. When they sell a laptop with a pre-installed MS OS, do they provide the
> OS CD/DVD media along with it?

In my experience only Dell gives media.  All others have the image on
the HDD and you are supposed to create the media,  which invariably
fails when you need it :(    So you need to make ISO files from the
media and store them in a couple of locations.

> 2. Can one install the OS on a different computer with these CDs or they
> make sure it would install only on the machine it was shipped with?

No.   The lic. is tied to the hardware, the label is on the laptop.

> 3. Is it possible to at least partition such a laptop disk and re-install
> MS OS on a small partition and use the rest of space for other OS? (Or
> even virtual box).

Absolutely.   I usually use the media and re-install with a smaller
partition size.

-- Arun Khan