You are here: Home / Journal / Trying to buy a PC without Windows part 4 – eBuyer

Trying to buy a PC without Windows part 4 – eBuyer

ByGarf

This is the fourth article in a series of case studies illustrating the difficulty one has purchasing a PC in the UK without being forced to pay a “Microsoft Tax”. We use Linux on all our PC’s and have done so for several years. Therefore we do not need, nor should we be forced to pay for any Microsoft software licenses. This week we focus on eBuyer.

EBuyer is another British “pile-em-high-sell-em-cheap” internet-based box-shifter that shifts a heck of a lot of PCs and laptops. We have bought quite a bit of kit from it over the last two years including the two laptops mentioned in our Vista woes might lead us to better things article.

Ebuyer’s Penguin rating

Marks out of five for eBuyer’s customer care.
(This would have been zero but
Dell did actually manage to call us back once)		 Penguin points graphic Penguin nil-points graphic Penguin nil-points graphic Penguin nil-points graphic Penguin nil-points graphic
Marks out of 5 for eBuyer’s penguin-friendliness Penguin nil-points graphic Penguin nil-points graphic Penguin nil-points graphic Penguin nil-points graphic Penguin nil-points graphic
Overall rating 1/10 = hopeless!

Events

In a nutshell, we have purchased four Lenovo 3000C200laptop PC’s from eBuyer. The laptops performed abysmally under Windows Vista. So we replaced Vista with Kubuntu GNU/Linux, which performs amazingly well in comparison. Sadly however eBuyer has refused to refund our money for the appealingly bad and inappropriate Windows software it supplied. So we closed our account and will never darken their doorstep again.