Dear Microsoft+Dell,
I recently bought a Dell laptop coming with Windows 7 Pro. The Windows were preinstalled, and of course they were running fine. A small worry come up to me when I noticed that the laptop did not have the familiar sticker certifying the genuinity of windows and its activation key anymore.
I am very scarcely using Windows and the only reason I bought it on this machine was in order to accomplish some administrative tasks run by windows programs of my university. Therefore, I was planning to install windows as a guest operating system on a virtual machine and run Windows from my host Linux OS. I did NOT want to use windows by dual booting the machine, since this destroys my main work in order to accomplish a secondary task.
I was shocked to learn that this was not possible and that I needed to buy a NEW license in order to be able to do so. I am not happy, because the advertising of the product does not make this clear (see e.g. this ad and click on the Help me Choose link of the operating system paragraph, of course all other ads from various shops that I found are not any better on this issue). I consider this as not a fair consumer practice that needs to be corrected. I am sure that you can find technical solutions to such problems.
Making things complicated for us does not help. I know you guys are complaining a lot about piracy. But as Google said:piracy is an availability and pricing problem. I would add, trying to control how we run our machines does not help either.
Posted on my blog