Great post and enlightening for me. I have always been someone who has had a hard time throwing away old computers when I can restore them and throw on an old version of Windows. Now I suppose I will be entertaining the idea of throwing on Linux. I even have nearly broken laptops that overheat from factory defects that I feel terrible throwing away (Dell XPS15) because it cost me over $1,500 with a “HD” screen option and NVIDIA graphics (that overheated the motherboard). In any case I don’t sell anything but feel the same about putting them in landfills. I always try to at least reuse hard drives and if possible optical drives until failure. I also have a box full of older Pentium chips and GPU’s and cases but anyway this is a terrible thing Microsoft has done. I understand the precedent being set that people should not make money selling computers with pirated software and I guess I agree fundamentally but there should be a line. The line should be that people are allowed to use software on older PC’s that are no longer being supported by the company so for example Windows XP. Microsoft is not spending any money towards it nor selling any new products with it so it should be emulator territory. No harm no foul. But it does raise the question of, can we simply use a free Linux distro and turn the e-waste issue into a Windows OS and Apple OS duopoly issue. Chrome OS is similar to Linux so maybe that is where we all need to be heading. F Bill Gates and his lawyers. The richest guy for the past 20 years almost and he is complaining about landfill PCs and a guy who spent a ton of time fixing up computers for people that can’t afford the Surface Pro 4. Good for him and the 15 months just made you a star in my eyes so keep fighting the good fight! He will get a lot of fan mail and likely be released early because of the PR. I mean seriously, Microsoft putting a citizen in jail for over a year of their natural life for fixing old PCs that were headed to the trash heap? Shame on them!!!