My finger is hovering nervously over the purchase button.

I know I’m just paying for the license so how can it be made cheaper by re-sellers? Ebuyer are selling Win7 £50 cheaper than PC World and an Amazon re-seller is selling it way cheaper than Ebuyer:

It’s an OEM edition rather than retail, looking at that.

This is for my son’s laptop – I bought an OEM edition to put on my desktop at the start of the year but was £80, I don’t think I fully understand the OEM thing but it will be the equivalent of installing an OS on a new machine.

The OEM thing means you haven’t really got an official version of windows.
The licence wont cover you. It’s for manufacturers to install on a PC – so they will buy 100 licenses, install them on PCs then sell the PCs. In many cases you wont even get a disc – just a serial number and a sticker.

Whether that matters to you or not is up to you. You wont be hassled by pop-ups, etc, like with fake versions, but there is a chance you’ll be on your own if you need any support from microsoft that lets them dig deeper into your system.

There is also a chance that you cannot upgrade the OS in the future and a chance that you’ll never be able to install this version on another PC in the future (it’s normally locked to the motherboard when installed by the manufacturer). Even then, sometimes people call MS and say they had to change motherboards because of a failure, and they allow it. But it’s still a risk as with all of this you are really side-stepping a real licence.

OEM ones generally go for about £40 on ebay and are the same product. You will get your own license key, but it’s one that should be part of a hardware package, so if you look at all the ebay auctions they ‘should’ offer you the original hardware as well (wink).

I think that for the cost reduction it’s okay for the licence it to be tied to the machine. I couldn’t afford to do it otherwise.

It is rather confusing that most places seem to be selling OEM rather than retail. One seller on Amazon selling ‘refurbished’ Windows has me rather perplexed.

It’s an official copy of Windows but you get to provide your own support for the machine it is on, Microsoft won’t be interested in helping you with driver issues and the like. Updates to the OS work fine.
I run copies on both the Mac Bootcamp partitions without a problem.

I’ve just bought an OEM windows 7 from amazon for 50 quid. It’s fine, comes with a license key.

I dunno man, £50 for an 12 year old obsolete operating system doesn’t sound cheap to mee