In Shenzhen, I have had both of your experiences. In buying mass market, name brand laptops, legit copies of Windows were normal. But from the same electronics malls, my experience was that almost nobody bought these [much more expensive] computers, and instead preferred the cheap knockoffs with tons of pre-installed pirated software. There were also -- always -- hawkers offering ripped copies of software, music & DVDs on the street outside.

those are not knockoffs,but DIY counter or shop,no named brand,Do It Yourself,at your own interest and risk.most these DIY shops only exist in electronic components shopping malls,visitors of such malls of course prefer DIY. Most normal people just buy named brand computers pre-installed OS in normal malls,electrical shops，brand stores,and even in big supermarkets such as Carrefour. so I am very strange and shocking that Apfel can not buy a named brand computer pre-installed legal OS in the third largest city of china

For the record, I also checked my local 大润发 and 国美电器, where they did the same shit.

This is not related to experience, but common sense, all big brands of computers should sell legitimate products, such as HP, DELL, as far as I know, they also occupy a large share of the Chinese market, they are large-scale piracy in the Chinese market? Perhaps there may be some misunderstanding or communication problems, as far as I know, some big brands of computer have pre-installed operating system on the hard disk recovery partition, does not provide the operating system install disc, but the restore disc.

I've said this in another comment, but here goes again:

Actually, the laptops I tried out were almost all Dell + Lenovo (I wanted a thinkpad or XPS). I think, as another commenter said, they were probably Linux + FreeDOS systems originally. What the store owners would do is use Norton Ghost to put whatever (illegal) OS I wanted on there.

I think maybe there are large regional differences in product availability or regulation. I know it was a lot harder to buy iPhones in certain tier 1 Chinese cities than others when I was there, for example.

Maybe you were not trying hard enough. https://microsoft.tmall.com/

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