A change of OS can void warranty…

I’m totally gobsmacked.

Today, I was talking to a friend about her new Vista laptop and the various troubles she’s been having. She said she’d love to run Ubuntu on it but couldn’t because removing Vista would void the laptop’s warranty.

Now, I can understand playing with the hardware itself voiding the warranty (overclocking etc), but formatting the hard drive and installing another OS? What the ….

I did a bit of googling on the subject and it turns out to be quite wide-spread too – apparently a lot of people have been told this by various manufacturers.

Watch out for that I’d say.. certainly makes even more sense to buy a machine with nothing on it.