[ale] M$ refund

[Mike Harrison]

> Good for him. In the US we have an even better option: buy one with
> linux to begin with.

We (work) just bought 14 point of sale systems, touchscreens, card swipes, 
and printers.. without OS, and was limited to buying the models w/512k ram 
rather than the 1g that the WinXP based systems had. But the smart sales 
dude offered to sell me matching ram that I had to install (we bought it).

I asked the rare clueful sales droid, why can't I get the no-OS systems 
with 1gb of ram, his story was that their agreement with M$ only allows 
them to sell "lesser" machines without OS, that if the specs matched a 
system that they sell with WinXP or Vista, they had to sell it with WinXP 
or Vista.

Sure seems to ring true with what I see on the market.