bestbuy told me not to use gentoo

[oliver]

I was buying a new laptop in bestbuy, and for anyone who's never bought one there before, after you've chosen one, they have to "find" a manager to unlock the cage where they're stored. During this time, they try to sell you the extended warranty and accessories.

After I politely refused the warranty, they tried to sell me MS Office. Again I refused and was offered MSN and lots of other windows software. Finally, I said I wouldn't be running Windows and did not need to buy any software.

Upon hearing this, I was told that installing another o/s would invalidate my warranty and toshiba would not replace anything that went wrong. I told them I found that very hard to believe and in any case I would just use the restore disks. I was then told that once you remove windows, a file gets lost and you cannot use the restore disks. The salesman then asked me what version of RedHat I would be installing. When I replied "not RedHat but Gentoo" he informed me that someone bought my exact same laptop 2 days before and installed Gentoo which broke everything. All he could do was put Win98 on there to use the laptop again. (!)

I asked him if he was saying that Gentoo would break my laptop and invalidate any hardware warranty and he said "I don't know if it will break it, but the warranty will be gone. I recommend you don't use gentoo"

I felt like I was in an episode of the Jamie Kennedy Experiment or something