This is an important point. It used to be that there really wasn't a whole lot of damage you could do to a machine with software, sure there was the 'set the monitor horizontal refresh to zero and burn up the flyback transistor' but that was about it. These days however, in an age of tightly managing clock speeds, heat, voltages, etc all under BIOS/driver control to maximize battery life, it is possible to not only damage but to completely brick a machine if it has either broken or malicious software running in 'ring 0'. And that puts people like NewEgg in a tight spot, having already to deal pretty evil stuff [1].
Then if you combine that with there is no way to 'restore' a laptop to its original OS install if you've re-partitioned and overwritten the 'recovery partition' on the hard drive. Nobody bothers to send recovery CDs any more, that is $3.85 in plastic they can't (or won't) put into the box. So now if you install Linux you've made it effectively impossible for the vendor to even attempt to start from a 'known good OS' and determine suitability. It does kinda suck.
That said, I prefer Amazon's policy as well and as more folks move there NewEgg will either adapt or die.
[1] Evil doer activity (documented) - get some bad memory (generally for free from some scrap pile, 'buy' a laptop, take its good memory out, put dead memory in, 'return' the laptop. Sad really. All the engineering effort that goes into thwarting the petty schemes of evil people.
Am I the only person that images my manufacturer's HDD when I first get a new box? I thought that would be fairly standard operating procedure for any geek who wants to avoid this sort of crap.
Hell, I do this twice when dealing with in-laws. The first time to make sure I can restore the OEM partition, and the second time so I can restore the thoroughly sanitized install when they filthy it up with malware and browser bars.
No you are not, like others I typically swap the drive with an SSD so I can return to 'factory' easily. That generally however involves breaking the 'factory seal' on the bottom which for NewEgg is one of their deal breakers.
This is why you buy Thinkpads. They've got a great warranty system, post the whole maintenance manual online, and don't void the whole warranty for single item changes (basically you change a hardware subsystem and you can't get warranty on that bit but the whole bit is still eligible)
I'd double check that next time you buy a new ThinkPad. I broke the screen on mine recently, and chose to replace it myself after being quoted an eyewatering (nearly cost of laptop) amount to have it repaired. The tech support person told me in no uncertain terms this would totally void my warranty.
If there are no warranty stickers, and you don't make any obvious changes or damage to the machine, you sometimes get away with 'breaking' the warranty. I've had this occur for a laptop that required opening to change the RAM (voiding warranty by all supporting documentation). I restored the original RAM before warranty, and they fixed it all the same.
Maybe it's just for minor changes, simple user upgrades instead of huge replacements like the screen? shrug I've never had to warranty my Thinkpad anyways thanks to them being tanks.
Clonezilla was the first word that popped into my head when I read the original post. Also helps resale value to put the 'factory' OS back on with the recovery partitions &c.
Then if you combine that with there is no way to 'restore' a laptop to its original OS install if you've re-partitioned and overwritten the 'recovery partition' on the hard drive. Nobody bothers to send recovery CDs any more, that is $3.85 in plastic they can't (or won't) put into the box. So now if you install Linux you've made it effectively impossible for the vendor to even attempt to start from a 'known good OS' and determine suitability. It does kinda suck.
That said, I prefer Amazon's policy as well and as more folks move there NewEgg will either adapt or die.
[1] Evil doer activity (documented) - get some bad memory (generally for free from some scrap pile, 'buy' a laptop, take its good memory out, put dead memory in, 'return' the laptop. Sad really. All the engineering effort that goes into thwarting the petty schemes of evil people.