Let’s all make a resolution for change in 2008: We aren’t going to put up with DSGI, the owners of the PC World brand, any longer.

Late in 2007, puzzled by all the ultra-cheap machines being offered by PC World in the UK, I asked a corporate PC buyer whether he was considering buying a batch.

My logic was simple: these machines were all specified for Vista with a gigabyte of Ram, which really is not enough. My corporate friends all use XP and intend to carry on using it, and a £300 laptop with a gig and a 60GB hard disk is a nice platform for XP.

My friend said: “No, because Dixons Group [now DSGI] won’t honour the warranty if you change the operating system from Vista.”

Now, Microsoft has made it very clear to me (in answer to a specific query) that any machine that is sold with Vista bundled would be entitled to get XP as an alternative “for the foreseeable future”. XP continues to be a supported OS. Why does DSGI think it invalidates the warranty? Surely, this must be some junior sales assistant, not official company policy?

My friend said: “All I can tell you is that we considered the idea, and I approached senior sources inside Dixons, and they specifically denied responsibility for warranty if we made any change to the configuration as supplied.”