Don’t believe the crap that some sites are feeding you about this buzz you are hearing about free laptop bribes. I have seen the list of people that were offered these. I know alot of the names, I also personally know a couple that received them as well. It it wrong to receive a device to review and get to keep it when you are done? It all depends on who you ask. I am not going to take time to mention what I paid for and what I didn’t pay for. I hope that the readers of my reviews would just assume that everything I review was provided to me free of charge for review purposes. Sure, I pay for some things, but most of the items are review are not paid for by myself.  I guess I will have to add a little graphic to each review of something I pay for saying… PAID FOR BY ME!

Anyhow, back to the subject at hand. Here is what Aaron Coldiron from WindowsVista.com had to say in comments of the source article.

Let me take a minute to respond to some of these comments. Yes, Windows Vista and AMD sent out review computers to bloggers. Why? Because we believe in the power of community, we believe in our product, and we are partnering with AMD to give bloggers the best hardware experience we can.

I understand the concerns on ethics, and I share them. We have been up front that these are review pcs, and we encourage bloggers to disclose that. Here’s the language we used in the review outreach:

“Full disclosure - while I hope you will blog about your experience with the pc, you don’t have to. Also, you are welcome to send the machine back to us after you are done playing with it, or you can give it away on your site, or you can keep it. My recommendation is that you give it away on your site.�

I hope this information helps. We want to be fully transparent about what we are doing here.

Aaron Coldiron, Windows Vista

Reading this long thread of comments, it seems the folks that are whining are those that were not offered this deal.

Mauricio Fretias, a good pal of mine, posted about the coming of his laptop. In his post, he clearly stated that it was courtesy of AMD and Microsoft.

This laptop will arrive with Windows Vista installed and ready to use, courtesy of AMD and Microsoft. I plan to replace my P4 HT 3GHz desktop and Toshiba M200 Tablet PC with this machine.

Scoble and Slashdot are talking about this issue too!

Source: Microsoft hands out Ferrari’s to bloggers - istartedsomething

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