Buying new pc and Microsoft OEM rules

[rckngslnd]

Hi

 

I'm trying to spec up some upgrades we doing, we looking to buy some RM PC without no OS as we buying licensing from another company. They saying to me that under Microsoft OEM rules they have to ship with a OS. This confuses me as I'm buying hardware and could install any free OS if i wanted anyway. Anyone no the rules for this as it seems stupid buying OS for no reason.

 

Thanks in advance

[AngryTechnician]

They may be referring to the fact that when you buy Windows licences through volume licensing schemes such as EES or Schools Agreement, they are upgrade licences only, and there has to be a Windows licence (of any kind) on the box already.

 

They may also have an agreement with Microsoft not to sell with no OS due to being an approved OEM for Windows licensing, therefore if they started supplying without, Microsoft could stop giving them OEM pricing.

[glen_j]

just for info when manufaturers build the pc's they mark a flag in the bios to say it has an os preinstalled, you cannot activate windows 7 using kms if this flag is not present. this is also true if you build your own pc's. you might find that most of the time manufacturers will not ship without an os as it actually creates more work for them.

[pbainbridge]

buy the RMs and install Edubuntu, free of charge

[VeryPC_Andy]

Hi ,

Unfortunately MS licensing agreements for desktop OS are upgrade licenses, meaning that to be compliant with MS licencing, the desktop you are putting on OS on needs to have a compliant OEM or retail license already on the machine. This is essentially is to maximise microsoft licencing revenues.

 

If you choose too not to have an OS and install the MS upgrade license anyway this is possible, as the upgrade does not require the ms key on the desktop install to install. By doing this you are breaking MS licensing regulations and it is not advised.

 

Compliant license types can be found here;

(for windows 8) Microsoft Volume Licensing - Windows 8

(for windows 7) Microsoft Volume Licensing - Windows 7

 

Qualifying licence types for upgrade will depend on your type of licencing agreement .

 

Are you on an EES agreement and what OS do you what to install ?

 

Out of interest what spec and type of desktop are you looking at ?

 

Hope this is useful

 

I'll send a PM with my details to discuss further if needed.

 

Cheers

 

Andy

[mavhc]

It's as if there's some plan to screw over linux users, but they wouldn't do that, they're so friendly.

 

In other news alpha version of smb v2 for linux is available, for some reason MS made changes that took 6 years to reverse engineer.

[tmcd35]

In other news alpha version of smb v2 for linux is available, for some reason MS made changes that took 6 years to reverse engineer.

 

Good to see Samba is keeping up - I'll be installing smb v3 next year!