Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1999 09:34:31 -0700 (MST) From: "Donna." <donna.s@niestu.com> Subject: Re: Refund for Unused Preloaded Windows On 6 February 1997, after researching the then-current market on notebooks, I decided upon and bought a Canon Innova Book 490 CDS. After trying to buy it without the preloaded Windows 95 and being refused, I booted up the virgin machine and was asked if I agreed to the license agreement. When I clicked "NO" I was instructed to get a refund from the manufacturer of the machine. I spent the rest of February 1997 in e-mail with a number of Customer Service personnel at Canon, trying to explain that all I wanted to return for a refund was the operating system, as per the licensing agreement. By the end of February I had gone from line grunt to supervisor to manager, who promised to run it through their Legal Department. In April 1997 I had to write back to request a followup, and by the end of April he wrote back to instruct me: return the sealed package of Win95 CD, manual, and documentation to his attention, and a refund of $99 would be on its way. It was very important that the product be sealed in its original packaging, and I counted myself lucky I wouldn't have to send back the hard drive to prove that I had never agreed to the license agreement and, therefore, had never used the Windows partition. (I'd used FIPS to repartition the drive and install Linux without disturbing Windows, so the machine could be used while Canon considered the request, although after the refund came in I reclaimed the 330Mb Windows had stolen from me.) I'm sorry to be unclear as to when we received the refund because I became very sick shortly after that and my personal paper records from that time period are in disarray, but we deposited it not long after my surgery, which was in July 1997. I consider the battle won in three months, however, since that's how long it took for the agreement to refund to come through; the rest was simply delays in coping with the physical aspects of mailing the package and dealing with the check. Donna. Linux developer donna.s@niestu.com