Frankly I'm inclined to believe that the guy at Best Buy was speaking out of his ass. I catch at least one Best Buy sales person doing that every time I go in there (which is rare these days since they seem to be targeting the less-than-technically-adept even more than they used to). Frankly I find it hard to believe Microsoft would go to those sorts of lengths to attack a rival that has < 2% desktop/laptop market share. It would be a stupid waste of resources that could be better used bribi...er, persuading game designers to use DirectX so that everyone has to either run their games on XBox/Windows PCs or pay a licensing fee to Microsoft. That'd net them far more resources than going after the really non-existant dollars to be had in forcing consumers to keep the OS their computers came with.
As for Lenovo, here's a thought. Make that RAID setting default, but GIVE YOUR CUSTOMERS THE OPTION TO DISABLE IT! Seriously, once they drop money on the machine, it's theirs. If they want to turn off your (admittedly good) feature in order to install an OS the machine didn't come with then let them. Hell, even void their warranty for doing so if you feel like you need to, but do not try to control what they do with their own machine.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
