The Microsoft Tax

I recently decide to purchase a Laptop. My concerns were: must be 64-bit, must be lightweight, should be tiny. Using the venerable pricegrabber, which lets you sort and filter by many aspects (and so beats froogle to a bloody pulp), I decided upon a factory refurbished AV4155-EH1 by Averatec.

The stats:
Amd Turion 64 Mobile-30 at 1.6GHz
13 inch, 1280×800 TFT screen
512MB DDR2
80GB HD
10/100 and 802.11b/g wireless ethernet
4.2 lbs

All for the rather reasonable price of $529. I plan on using it up at the local community college, because I don’t have an account on the machines in the library (I’m not a student, I just hang out.). Once I receive it Windows XP will be defenestrated in favor of Gentoo Linux.

After I purchased it, I called up the dealer and asked a sales rep if I could get it without Windows. He said “No, the factory pre-installs it.” And that’s how, even though I refuse to use Microsoft products they still steal money from me.