PC World says Linux will invalidate warranty!

[Phosphoric]

Title says it really.

Just bought a Toshiba laptop from PC World that has MS Vista pre-installed. Asked if it came with the installtion disk and the techie said no. So I said it didn't matter because I was probably going to install Linux on it.

Techie then quietly advised me that if I committed such a heinous crime it would invalidate my warranty! I told him that I wasn't after software support obviously just hardware warranty, but he still insisted that if I put Linux on the hard drive which then broke they would not honour the warranty.

What a load of bxxxxcks. :lolflag:

[frup]

Thats exactly the sort of BS which needs to be made illegal

[OffHand]

You should have recorded it like Vincent Ferrari recorded his cancellation call to AOL.

[mitanc]

You should have recorded it like Vincent Ferrari recorded his cancellation call to AOL.

Wow, I wish I could have heard that call. I swear, the tech support people are such idiots. They should give us a list of what doesn't void the warranty. As it is, whenever I have some kind of warranty repair needed it feels like I need to pull teeth to get it done.

[OffHand]

Wow, I wish I could have heard that call. I swear, the tech support people are such idiots. They should give us a list of what doesn't void the warranty. As it is, whenever I have some kind of warranty repair needed it feels like I need to pull teeth to get it done.

Have a listen: http://media.putfile.com/AOL-Cancellation

[bionnaki]

well, if you ever need to utilize the warranty and have to mail in your laptop, you could always wipe the drive clear of your linux install and they wouldnt know.

[Adamant1988]

Title says it really.

Just bought a Toshiba laptop from PC World that has MS Vista pre-installed. Asked if it came with the installtion disk and the techie said no. So I said it didn't matter because I was probably going to install Linux on it.

Techie then quietly advised me that if I committed such a heinous crime it would invalidate my warranty! I told him that I wasn't after software support obviously just hardware warranty, but he still insisted that if I put Linux on the hard drive which then broke they would not honour the warranty.

What a load of bxxxxcks. :lolflag:

I've been told the same thing about my hardware from DELL. Sucks.

[fuscia]

i wonder if putting vista on my laptop would invalidate my system76 warranty.

[tigerpants]

Thats exactly the sort of BS which needs to be made illegal

It is illegal as well as being supremely idiotic. There is no reason at all why installing software can invalidate a hardware warranty. Complete crap. I would have called the manager and told him to stop talking such b*****cks. Remember this: people that work in computer shops assume everyone in the world is an idiot. Challenge them. I do. I normally get my way.

[Randomskk]

Haha, when I went to PC World to buy a laptop, they let me try out the Breezy live CD on all the ones I was interested on, in the end the laptop I got had working Xorg and wireless out of the box, which was nice to know.

[matthew]

I've heard this before. My response:

"I'm afraid you are misinformed. That's just not accurate. In any case, I'll buy from someone else who won't give me this kind of hassle."

Vote with your wallet. That's what corporate bean counters understand.

EDIT: I missed this sentence the first time. " Just bought a Toshiba laptop from PC World..." Obviously my advice is worthless if you have already made the purchase. Sorry about that.

[tageiru]

This is not unreasonable. Uncertified operating systems can do nasty things with hardware. A recent example is the corruption of the real time clock in some dell laptops caused by ubuntu.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.15/+bug/43745

[hoagie]

Do what Matthew said, if you haven't already bought it. Try to find a store that at least supports the notebook which you are buying without giving a hassle about the operating system.

[pay]

This is not unreasonable. Uncertified operating systems can do nasty things with hardware. A recent example is the corruption of the real time clock in some dell laptops caused by ubuntu.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.15/+bug/43745You can reset the bios

[tageiru]

You can reset the bios

True, but do you think that dell and the other hardware vendors want to pay the support cost for solving problems like that? If they needed to maintain warrenty for uncertified operating systems and there is a bug which fries the hardware, what then?

[darrenm]

Title says it really.

Just bought a Toshiba laptop from PC World that has MS Vista pre-installed. Asked if it came with the installtion disk and the techie said no. So I said it didn't matter because I was probably going to install Linux on it.

Techie then quietly advised me that if I committed such a heinous crime it would invalidate my warranty! I told him that I wasn't after software support obviously just hardware warranty, but he still insisted that if I put Linux on the hard drive which then broke they would not honour the warranty.

What a load of bxxxxcks. :lolflag:

Which branch was it? I want to ring them for an official response.

[Kateikyoushi]

Wonderful, I will ask this everytime before I buy something and if they mention it voids my warranty just go to another store.

[darrenm]

A consequence of people who see nothing but Windows day-in day-out. They get "nothing but Windows" engraved in their head.

2 things I've always felt like doing to PCWorld:

1. Leave a Ubuntu live CD in the CD-ROM drive. All computers are set to boot from CD-ROM first anyway and PCWorld shut their PC's down at night. A member of staff walks around in the morning pressing the power button on each one so they would have them all running Ubuntu and not know what to do with them.

2. Leave a bootable CD-ROM with a ghost image of Ubuntu in the CD-ROM drive running ghost with the command line switches to automatically restore the partition (2 switches, can't remember which ones) so under the same rules as above Ubuntu gets installed to every computers HDD.

3. The nastiest : Leave a bootable CD-ROM in the drive with a Award BIOS flash with the switches set to auto-flash ignoring the checksum errors. Disclaimer: This would effectively brick all the display PC's and is something that should never be done!

[doobit]

Haha, when I went to PC World to buy a laptop, they let me try out the Breezy live CD on all the ones I was interested on, in the end the laptop I got had working Xorg and wireless out of the box, which was nice to know.

What make/model is that? Please start a thread called "Ubuntu compatible laptops" and put that info in it. I think that would be a great help to people who are looking to buy.

:)

[tigerpants]

This is not unreasonable. Uncertified operating systems can do nasty things with hardware. A recent example is the corruption of the real time clock in some dell laptops caused by ubuntu.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.15/+bug/43745

Its completely unreasonable. What constitutes an "uncertified" operating system? There is no such thing. Its laziness on behalf of PC World and Dell et al. Windows is just as capable of corrupting the real time clock as any linux distro. Sorry, but its complete crap and vendors that say this sort of thing need to be challenged on it. Its another case of big companies trying it on with consumers.

PC World/Currys/Dixons (same group) are notorious crapheads anyway. I've had run-ins with them before over aptops (one I bought from them overheated all the time) and they tried every single excuse to get out of giving me a refund or replacing the faulty laptop immediately. They kept saying "we can't give you a refund on this laptop" - "Why?" - "We dont give refunds, not company policy, its been too long, we have to send it to repair" etc.

Crap. I got the manager out, quoted Consumer Rights law at him, and he shut the hell up.

I got my refund. This sort of behaviour really annoys me.

Don't stand for any crap from them. They really will try it on. Bite back :)

[darrenm]

I used to work for DSG. I used to question company policy against the law with managers all the time and the response was always "we do what we can get away with"

[KaroSHiv0n]

Another solution is to do what i did:
when sending your laptop/computer back, take out the hdd, if your questioned, say you had a professional remove it due to sensitve/banking information that you diddnt want out your house. Ive done that twice now and the tech diddnt even blink, and the second time i got a free new hdd fitted :D

[Linuturk]

Crap. I got the manager out, quoted Consumer Rights law at him, and he shut the hell up.

Hmm, I want to memorize those. Got a link?

[darrenm]

British law unfortunately :( Its the sales of good act 1979 (amended 1994). Everyone thats ever bought a car in the UK knows them off by heart.

[Choad]

when i emailed the support for my zepto notebook (a little known company) they were suprisingly accomodating for linux.

when i mentioned i had linux, the lady i was talking to said she didnt really know much about linux and said she'd try to get someone who knew more about it to help me. no mention of "zomg teh haxxors you have invalidated your warranty"

obviously there was no official support, but i wasnt paying for any support at all (the laptop didnt even come with xp). in the end, nothing was really sorted, but its a damn sight better than pc world :p:

[w00dchaz]

You need to e-mail www.consumerist.com about this and see if they'll post it, and maybe call the vendor and scare the hell out of them.

[TrailerTrash]

I had a new Toshiba laptop that just had Linux only on it. It need repair because of hardware problems (screen), and i sent it back to Toshiba and they said it was no problem that Linux was installed instead of XP. They honored the warranty. I recommend Toshiba highly. Maybe they like Linux? :cool:

[kazuya]

Not many support folks are really capable of supporting PC systems. SOme are not aware at all about what an OS even is. That is a shame. It is like someone arguing with me that aol is faster than DSL internet. You see my point.
The warranty void could be related to the manufacturers though, not having a CD to reimage the PC. This is what I was led to believe in Microcenter I believe. In the end, they fixed the issue for me.

When you install another OS. It seems a good idea to reinstall or create the windows OS image first for them, and then you may wipe off their OS from the machine. As they may not know what to dop when they turn on the machine, and it says,

grub>

This was what happened in my case. Lucky for us, they had a techie who knew how to reformat a drive and reimage machine.

I would have expected them to always reimage a machine before reselling it to a new user. What if previous owner put some malicious codes or data, etc into the machine before returning it.

The software change does not impact the hardware. If I opened the laptop and took a part off, I can understand. But when I buy that machine with my money, it becomes mine.

If there exists a hardware deficiency they have to fix it provided I am on my warranty period. Otherwise, they should deduct the cost of the warranty from my PC costs and then it is entirely mine to bear.

Do not charge me for a service I do not need or that you would not fulfill.

[doobit]

I had a new Toshiba laptop that just had Linux only on it. It need repair because of hardware problems (screen), and i sent it back to Toshiba and they said it was no problem that Linux was installed instead of XP. They honored the warranty. I recommend Toshiba highly. Maybe they like Linux? :cool:

I think they do. I had an old Toshiba laptop and it was great with Linux.

[purplearcanist]

OMG! I am thinking of buying a laptop and putting Ubuntu on it.

Ubuntu should not break the warranty for the laptop. People have the right to install any OS on their computer. The only reason the warranty could be broken is if the hardware falure was caused directly by the software.

How dare they do this...

[EdThaSlayer]

Try reading the *whole* term of license and check if they say anything about Linux invalidating the warranty.

[lamalex]

Yeah, HP told me the same thing. I just hung up on them, called back, lied though my teeth over the phone, then wiped the hard drive before I sent it in.

[PrinceArithon]

From what I understand, Dell prefers you to remove the hard drive before you send in the computer.

Still it all doesn't matter. I would never EVER send in my hard drive with my laptop. I always have music files on it that were given to me from bands that haven't released their material yet, or my own music that hasn't been released yet. If they want me to send in my comp with the hard drive they can lick my back side. It will not happen at all.

[ashleycrue]

I just got a reminder from PC world that my performance agrement was up for renewal, which basically covers repairs,etc.I'd forgotten about but then thought 'ring and ask about a dvd drive replacement (old one broken and expensive to replace).
I to the person the other end what the problem was and told him the laptop had linux on he said no problem pick up Friday.
Off course I included a ubuntu disk in case reinstall was needed and instructions not to put XP back on (I don't trust them to do this off course).
The laptop was a tosiba.

[shining]

Is it be possible to do some nasty things to hardware from software (caused by a driver bug or whatever) ?

[darrenm]

Yep. You can set an internal PC speaker on fire using a couple of lines of code. But it can happen as much with Windows as it can with Linux.

[xmastree]

FWIW, I was looking for a laptop on ebay, and I came across a 'spares or repair' one which apparently had been damaged by the OS, which was linux. What had happened, according to the seller, was that some upgrade was running overnight, and something in that upgrade managed to stop the CPU fan, so it fried.

[mips]

FWIW, I was looking for a laptop on ebay, and I came across a 'spares or repair' one which apparently had been damaged by the OS, which was linux. What had happened, according to the seller, was that some upgrade was running overnight, and something in that upgrade managed to stop the CPU fan, so it fried.

What was the price ? Mobile cpus are not expensive and easy to replace.

[xmastree]

What was the price ? Mobile cpus are not expensive and easy to replace.
I can't remember, it was months ago now. I bought a working one instead.

[CbrPad]

I bought a laptop with Pc World too, in Ireland, and had it break. Had them tell me the warranty was invalidated by not having the original o/s on it, but told them I'd specified when buying it originally that I would be wiping Windows to which they had no problem at the time, and said that if they weren't going to fix it I wanted my money back as I'd been missold it. They folded quickly after that, and acknowledged that the warranty covers all h/w probs, though that they obviously cannot support s/w issues, which is fair enough.

[Tobster]

PC World I dont like them, I could not find Star Office, in fact I could not find any non MS products, They live and breath Microsoft it sucks.

I found that smaller computer shops that are run by self employed people tend to be more positive about Linux. There are two in Colcherster and they both helped me out with hardware and sometime lost a sale by being honest with me.

Big store like PC World are not always 100% with people because they work on commission

[Linuturk]

Toshiba has great linux support. They even have a site dedicated to development for linux.

[warp99]

In the US the Magnusson Moss Warranty Act of 1975 covers the issue of installing another OS instead of what was installed by the manufacturer. Unless the warranty in writing stipulates that you can't install another OS the claim of voiding the warranty is bogus. :)

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/warranty.htm

[maxamillion]

My first computer was a HP, it had a Pentium3 and 128mb of ram and that was blistering fast at the time. It came with WindowsME, I then went to linux, to XP, dual boot, and back to linux ... one day came when I needed to call tech support to see if they would replace my failed cd-rom drive and I mentioned that I had linux installed on it and the lady I was speaking to told me that it voided the warranty because I changed the operating system. I believe that now that HP has embraced the Linux world since then that this would no longer be the case, but it is true that some companies will freak out about that.

[Bezmotivnik]

This is not unreasonable. Uncertified operating systems can do nasty things with hardware.
That's true. There was an interesting example of this on Digg a while back, where an IT manager of a large company discovered in an inadvertent well-controlled experiment that Red Hat was killing networks cards. Ubuntu messes up the cooling controls on my notebook, which could certainly damage it, etc. etc...

There's a canard that "software cannot damage hardware," but it's not true. It can and it does, often quite gradually.

[muguwmp67]

Just bought a Toshiba laptop from PC World that has MS Vista pre-installed. Asked if it came with the installtion disk and the techie said no. So I said it didn't matter because I was probably going to install Linux on it.:
Isn't this considered by microsoft to be a serious violation of its OEM shipping agreements? I thought they were required to distribute install media and a serial # with every pc, in an effort to keep them honest when its time to bill them.

I'd be pretty angry if they didn't give me install media. Windows is worth 100 bucks or so, installing it on my hard drive is not the same as selling it. I'd consider calling Microsoft's anti-piracy line.

[macogw]

well, if you ever need to utilize the warranty and have to mail in your laptop, you could always wipe the drive clear of your linux install and they wouldnt know.

Any time you have trouble with hardware that's not the hard drive, you should send your computer without the hard drive. Then nosy people can't look at your stuff.

[FuturePilot]

Any time you have trouble with hardware that's not the hard drive, you should send your computer without the hard drive. Then nosy people can't look at your stuff.
QFT
I just heard on the news that some guy took his computer in for repair because it was running slow and the repair people found some *stuff* on there and reported him to the police. Probably had a virus or two on there also.

[warp99]

I just realized that under Magnusson Moss you can't stipulate that the OS must be Windows. Under the act you have a "Tie-in-Sales" Provision meaning you can't deny warranty repair because the consumer decided to use a different brand of a serviceable component.

So the claim of a voided warranty is completely without merit and unlawful to boot. :lolflag:

[steven8]

Toshiba has great linux support. They even have a site dedicated to development for linux.

They are? Wow. My usb cable has quite the declaration that they do have drivers other than windows for this device. :(

[ndefontenay]

On the other side of the world the perspective is very different.
It's been 3 years I'm in Thailand now.
In Bangkok, when you want to buy a computer, you go to one place: Panthip Plaza. It's not a vendor. It's a building with many vendors.
They will customize your computer the way you want it (you choose the hardware) or they will provide you a standard setup based on what you are going to do with it (They just ask a few questions).

They will install an illegal windows on it along with a few illegal stuff such as Nero, MS Office etc... The last time I went there, I showed them it's possible to get a free Office Suite. They were like shocked. They all heard about Linux but never worked with it.

The result is: Every single piece of hardware is always covered by warranty.
They won't be able to support on software if it's Linux.

Competition is fierce. If you say you're going to buy it with Linux installed, then they won't void your warranty. They'll tell you Linux works with it!

Another good news, I've seen a laptop with Linux pre installed on it. I forgot the brand... I'll have to go back and take a closer look.

Among the bad news, on the small shops selecting only pirated softwares, Linux is being sold for 100 baht (2 Euros) in the middle of "Sexy movies" and pirated games/softwares.

Considering the price, it might well be a good news in fact... Don't know how much is sold though.

[muguwmp67]

Among the bad news, on the small shops selecting only pirated softwares, Linux is being sold for 100 baht (2 Euros) in the middle of "Sexy movies" and pirated games/softwares.
.
Its a pretty strange world when Windows is free, but you pay for linux.

[Linuturk]

http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/su/su_navShell.jsp?cf=su_dme_linux.html&BV_SessionID=@@@@0170021102.1171469233@@@@&BV_EngineID=ccccaddkefiljgmcgfkceghdgngdgnn.0

There is the link to the Linux support Toshiba offers.

A quick search at dell turned up this:
http://search.dell.com/results.aspx?s=gen&c=us&l=en&cs=&k=linux&cat=sup

HP:
http://h10061.www1.hp.com/ccsearch/search?pname=&qry=linux&submit.x=0&submit.y=0&method=prodFinder&ctry=all&lang=en&dlc=en&sni=&search=0

It seems the big players have support for linux. There isn't any reason for them to "void" your warranty. They just want an excuse to skip the paperwork.

[GSF1200S]

Does anyone know whether or not IBUYPOWER considers Linux a void of warranty? I would kind of like to know, as I had an issue with my DVD RAM drive not being able to burn anything (happens in Windows and Linux).

If I have to Ill print out the act listed previously and go to war, but perhaps someone else has an idea?

Am I the only guy with an IBUYPOWER laptop?