What I am actually after is not an unbranded laptop per se but a decent spec laptop that comes without an OS preinstalled. Is there such a thing? I'd even be prepared to accept a preinstalled OS as long as it came with all installation disks and wasn't loaded up with 'special offers' on antivirus and office software that I have no need for.
I purchased an ASUS laptop from a refurb seller via ebay. Picked up a quad cored (1.5GHz) AMD, 4 GB RAM, 500GB HD and offboard video for just under £300. Most importantly for me came with no OS. I will try and find the name of the seller for you. Regards,
Novatech, PC Specialist, Eurocom all offer laptops without an OS. This is an unusual request. I'm curious as to why you want this.
Because if I were to buy say a Dell or Lenovo, the first thing I would do is wipe the disk and reinstall Win7 or just go with Ubuntu. I hate the bloated preinstalled OS that 'branded' laptops come with - all the crappy AV and office software I don't want, all their bloated useless utilities. Is it an unusual request? I'd have thought on this forum at least it would be quite common.
To be honest I agree with the OP I bought a Novatech laptop many years ago, I know these are just Clevo rebrands. And I chose to not have Vista as at the time Vista was new and crappy. I went with Retail XP and had little to no problems. Though a few years later I bought an Acer laptop with Vista installed. All was fine until the Vista Install partition died. I ended up replacing the drive and installing none bloated Vista. Oh and had a bad experience with an PCWorld install of Vista on a laptop from work. Would not update even though updates kept being available from MS. Ended up booting DOS from a Flash drive and formatting the HDD and installing XP. PCSpecialist also do custom laptops, gaming etc with a OEM install of Win7 I think you can choose not to have any OS at all though don't quote me on that.
If you buy direct from Lenovo they have this option. It is much easier to find this option in Germany then any other EU country. I am not sure if for lenovo this is a B2B option only or if you can get it on the consumer site too. Any way you can download for free and legal Officail install disk if your laptop didnt come with one. Either ring your Manfac, Windows or: (I think it was lifehacker) had an article on this with a link to the Digital River (largest online sales system) Win7 download link. Naturally you will need to own a real license and there is no guaranty that it will work with your Serial. It did work with my Lenovo but I would suggest making the backup disks just in case it doesn't. It is all up to exactly which "deal" the Manfac uses.
If you do go this route I would make sure that you go with a well-known 'no-name' laptop (not an oxymoron I hope) - my OH's work gave her a 'Stone' (not sure if a rebrand or not) laptop to use and it's a piece of junk - the hinges are falling apart, it's died twice in 2 years and needed reinstalling both time (good job I back up her files as they certainly don't) and the on/off button needs a good bash to make it work now...
I believe Novatech still do blank laptops, when you add the model your after to the checkout it gives you the option to select an OS with it or whether it is blank but just tested prior to dispatch.
Dell business models come with no crapware at all on them. Using a brand new Latitude with the default Win 7 install at the moment. I think any good branded laptop will not have all the crap on it. It's the crappy makes like Acer and HP that fill them with stuff. If you are just installing a new OS anyway it doesn't take long to do a format and will give you a wider variety of options. MSHunter, you can modify any version of Win 7 to work with any serial. You can change the iso to work for OEM, VL or retail keys and change the manufacturer code as well.
Off topic, I order E6220's atm direct from Dell, and I would say that the Dell Control Point sowftware is Bloatware, first thing that happens when it comes a machine comes in is a reinstall of Windows 7 from our WDS, which is clean up to date and has our application suite on it too!
Most of the major pc component shops in the uk will sell you a laptop without operating system. novatech overclockers to name 2 all offer laptops with no operating system. If your not after playing games check out dell business laptops which don't come with bloatware built in.
To be honest it is not really worth the effort of trying to find a cheap sans-OS laptop, and it is much easier to just get a normal laptop then wipe the hard disk (much like I did). Well, to be perfectly honest, I originally wanted a separate partition with Ubuntu on it, along with the default Windows 7 partition, but I deleted the boot partition (seriously, why does Windows 7 want a separate partition for booting from?) and couldn't be bothered to reinstall Windows, so I just nuked it and put Xubuntu on.
I've had a nice new custom built laptop for about 4 weeks now. Bought it from http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/ I got the optimus IV 15.6" with a quad core i7, 8gb ram and a gtx660m. Added my old intel 120gb drive and installed W8. Very impressed with build quality but it is a little chunky, I use it on a desk, and am somewhat chunky myself, so it suits me fine. For the pounds-performance ratio I couldn't find anything better, especially considering I had my own drive and an OS to go into it. What was you budget? And on another thought, If you were to buy a "normal" laptop, with a preinstalled OS, is it possible to reinstall from a disc image of the relevant OS and use the code that's usually stuck to the bottom of the system?
