copied xp

[purecain]

:down: a friend of mine has asked me to sort his pc out. unfortunatly his wife was sold a pc with a copied version of xp installed. so no updates and its now causing loads of problems as its only service pack 1....
my mate is not happy because his wife paid £1000:shocked: for a pc thats worth £300 at the most. the pc has been unstable and had incompatability problems with some of their other hardware... each time they've had a problem they returned the pc only to pick it up days later with the same problems,a load of nonsense and a £75 bill for their trouble.....

what to do?????
well i'm going to the shop that sold him the pc tommorow and i'm going to ask them to givie him back his money.
but what do i do if/when they say no? :shrug:
his wife has the reciept but they have had the pc over a year but hardly used it.
i cant seem to find any useful info so i could use some advice from anyone with knowledge of consumer law....
thanks in advance....
purecain...

[yankee]

After a whole year, I'd say you don't have a whole lot of recourse. I'm speaking from a US perspective, things may be different where you are. Consumer protection laws and all that.

At this point, with all of the grief they've been through, and if you're really serious about going after this guy, talk to a lawyer. Threats of litigation may also get him to change his tune if you're getting stonewalled. Be prepared to follow through.

Also, IANAL.

[purecain]

well the boss is avioding me atm but i'll catch up with him later on.... i'll let you know what he said....

[MikeB12]

personally if it were my pc, I'd just pick up an oem xpsp2 for $98 and be done with it. install it fresh and get the drivers from the web.
http://www.royaldiscount.com/wixphoedsp2f.html
for me it wouldn't be worth the hassle of arguing with the shop, especially on a +1yr old machine.

[twilyth]

I'd do whatever is expedient to get the machine up and running - might even consider giving Ubuntu a try. But if you're absolutely sure that you have a copied version of xp, you should call the national office for microsoft and report the shop. If they did this to you, they did it to a lot of people too and who better than MS to take legal action? It might not help you in the short run, but shutting these people down would help a lot of other folks down the road.

I don't have a problem with individuals making "back up copies" of their software, but it wizzes me off when people start trying to make a business out of it.

[purecain]

:up: thanks for the advice.... the name of the shop is pccity in harrogate near leeds:shakes: . the owner Mr.Jim Mamood said that my friend should take him to court:shakes: .
very arrogant and from the looks of it this guy has been ripping people off for quite some time....:shakes:
i'm going to give it a few days and ask him to reimburse my friend but he can consider himself reported.
the funny thing is my friend in question has a lot of money and this wont make any differance to his life. but now he's on a mission(on principle) to get this guy put out of buisness.:up:
i'll just sort it out for him for now and build him a nice up to date pc for the future.
thanks again everyone for the info, it is greatly appreciated...:up:

[yankee]

Some excellent advice from twilyth. They definitely should be reported to MS.
The number is 1800r-u-legit.

And cross your fingers that this :banana::banana::banana::banana:y SOB gets audited.

Here's their website for piracy reporting:
http://www.microsoft.com/piracy/reporting/default.aspx

As an aside, a shop i was working with got audited by microsoft. We had to pull 5 years of invoices and sift out the ones that had xp on them. It sucked hard.

[twilyth]

As an aside, a shop i was working with got audited by microsoft. We had to pull 5 years of invoices and sift out the ones that had xp on them. It sucked hard.
:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:
Yeah, even if they don't get arrested, doing all the paper work will be like getting bent over in the communal shower.

[Serra]

Report any retailer selling illegal copies of Windows. Microsoft follows up with those reports seriously, and they offer rewards of both money and - of course - a free copy of Windows (I think the rewards follow a scale of impact, so mileage may vary... but definitely something worth doing).