Now you tell me...

After drowning my last laptop in tea I needed a PC urgently and bought ASUS. Had I known that a refund was possible, would I have applied, to get what amounts to £10 refund on a £2K machine?

I am not sure!

The Windows install means my laptop has some value in the second-hand market, should I need to sell. Without it, I am not going to easily find a buyer, because it is still not yet 'the year of the Linux desktop', and even then, stock Ubuntu is not as fashionable as some other Linux variants.

What did surprise me was how flaky Windows is these days. If memory serves me correctly, I needed to boot into Windows to turn 'bitlocker' off, in order to resize the drive for my Ubuntu partition. However, there was no UI to turn 'bitlocker' on again afterwards. Allegedly I need a 'pro' version of Windows to do that, since the UI is just absent from the 'Home' version of Windows.

This process means that I did 'accept the EULA' and therefore denied myself the opportunity to claim back the Windows tax. Drat!

In previous decades I kept the Windows install just in case I needed MS Office or Adobe products to do work. MS Outlook was the 'gotcha', but then they got the web version of MS Outlook working acceptably.

Nowadays I am quite confident that there is nothing Windows that I want, so this use case has gone, yet I have new rationale to keep paying the Windows tax, to 'insure' my PC with some resale value.

I wish manufacturers such as ASUS provided Linux support, even if in a 'community' guise, so as to not upset Microsoft. With my example, I needed to change the power setting on the Wifi card to ensure that Bluetooth worked for the mouse. That was it, yet I had to work that out for myself, with no instructions provided. If I was completely new to Linux then I might have struggled with this or lacked the confidence to spend £2K on a machine that might not run my chosen OS.

In 2026 we still have a long way to go!