How do laptop manufacturers install windows on to their laptops?

[Giant_Hunger]

Lets say i wanted to start a laptop company and i ask a chinese factory to manufacture my laptop, now i want that laptop to be preinstall with windows, not ony that but i need to preinstall it with millions of laptops as well. Does the factories usually the one that install windows for the laptop or they will only ship the laptops to you and that you will need to install windows on to your laptops yourself? And if so do you need to uptain a windows license? Do you have to contact microsoft? And if you have to install windows on your laptops, how do you install windows on milions of laptops daily?

 

 

[Eigenvektor]

23 minutes ago, Giant_Hunger said:

And if so do you need to uptain a windows license? Do you have to contact microsoft?

Of course you do.

 

If an individual user doesn't have a valid license, Microsoft probably doesn't worry about it too much.

 

If a company sells millions of devices with Windows pre-installed they will absolutely want their share of the pie.

 

The manufacturer will have a contract with Microsoft and, depending on their size, likely gets a fair discount on license keys. But they still need to pay for them. They simply price that into the sales price of final machine.

[manikyath]

dividing this up in a few segments:

 

deploying windowd on devices:

there's a few options to do this

- the entire device could be assembled with an empty drive, and either installed with a USB device or over a network.

- the drives could be imaged with a master image before being assembled into the device.

in either case, the installation process itself would be a custom image that leaves OOBE for the end user to go trough, and everything else (updates, drivers) is either pre-packaged, or automated. i'm gonna handwave an explanation of setting up a windows image or installer, because if you need someone on a forum to explain you this, your laptop manufacturing company should hire a microsoft certified tech.

 

do you need a license:

yes. if the devices are for sale, every device needs a unique license.

 

how do you get these licenses:

if you're a small time business selling let's say at most a few douzen per month, you're not likely to get a stunning licensing deal with microsoft anyways, so you may as well buy retail OEM keys by the master carton (or being the modern world, buy digital licenses) to hand-install on the devices.

if you're planning to mass produce these laptops, you're in a position to figure out an automated process.. this is where i refer you to hiring a microsoft certified tech again.

 

sidenote, if you've ever wondered why windows license stickers have a barcode on them.. this is why. one would apply the license key sticker to the laptop, plug in a barcode scanner, and scan the barcode to enter the key.

[kb5zue]

The manufacturers buy the keys in bulk by the hundreds if not thousands.  I really can't imagine anyone (except the Chinese) paying a lot of people to sit down at a desk and installing Windows with the keys on a one at a time basis.  Only the Chinese could afford to do something like that.  They have the manpower for something like that.

[Eigenvektor]

4 hours ago, kb5zue said:

I really can't imagine anyone (except the Chinese) paying a lot of people to sit down at a desk and installing Windows with the keys on a one at a time basis.

No one in their right mind would do it that way, since there are much faster and easier ways. At my previous employer multiple employees got new machines. We installed exactly one machine the way we wanted it, then used sysprep to create an image and deployed that on the remaining machines.

 

You could easily automate that further by using a disk copy station that can write the image to dozens of disks at the same time. If you don't want to get into robotics at best you need a few people to swap the disks out any time the current batch is done imaging and assemble them back into the laptops. Ideally that would simply be part of the automated assembly process.