Some manufacturers try to force to use the preinstalled software on the PC you acquire, sometimes also claiming that alternative software will not work properly.
On 2018 Luca purchases a Lenovo Tablet/PC and, since it comes with Microsoft Windows pre-installed, he requested the refund to Lenovo, but Lenovo denied to refund Luca. A court case was initiated, and Lenovo was condemned to pay a punitive damages of 20’000 euros for its abusive behaviour.
After this “historic” case, some other refund were request to other companies, such as HP, Dell, Microsoft, Acer, and again to Lenovo. Each OEM tried to deny the refund, with various reasons such as contractual clauses contained in the sale contract or in the same license agreement, or the need to delete the Product Key stored in the MSDM BIOS ACPI table and therefore they require to send the PC to their laboratories. These reasons have no valid legal basis, because – at least in Italy – the license agreement is a contract totally unrelated to the sale contract, so a third party may not impose any action on your material good, and the license agreement has remained without causal and economic justification, because not accepted and missed to be concluded.
