"slate_leeper" wrote

| Thank you for that info. It's the "legitimately purchased one" I
| really need more info on. How can I directly ask MS this question?
| Will they sell me one?
|

MS no longer sells Win7. The available sources
are mostly OEMs that have leftover disks/licenses
that they bought in bulk. You should be able to
use one of those, but you'd need to carefully research
the hardware to make sure you can get drivers
for Win7: Determine exactly what you have for
motherboard, sound, graphics, etc and then check
with those companies for Win7 drivers.

The problem with Dell, and the reason that it's
not a good idea to buy Dell products, is that they
package the whole system, making it opaque. On
the one hand, if you're in business and only use
Dell, getting a supported driver for a Dell product
is a convenient process. It's like the AOL of OEMs.
They hide the facts from you, but you also don't
need to know the facts as long as you tay with
their system.

But in your case the
downside of their system becomes clear. Since
all the drivers are repackaged by Dell, it's not
always feasible to cut out the Dell middleman and
get the real driver directly from the hardware maker.
In some cases, Dell parts might be custom-order,
not existing on the open market. And their driver
downloads are custom-wrapped versions of the
actual drivers. Just as Home Depot
might order 5 million drills from DeWalt and be selling
model DW385002 while DeWalt doesn't actually
acknowledge the existence of that model. They
make 5000, 5001 and 5005. Will a replacement part
fit 5002? Probably. But there's no way to be sure
of exactly what's different. In the same way that
Home Depot now supports (or doesn't) model 5002,
Dell makes you go to them for hardware support.