Читать книгу Windows 11 All-in-One For Dummies - Ciprian Adrian Rusen - Страница 13

At the most fundamental level, all computer stuff comes in one of two flavors: hardware or software. Hardware is anything you can touch — a computer screen, a mouse, a hard drive, a keyboard, a Blu-ray drive. Software is everything else: your Microsoft Edge browser, the movies you stream on Netflix, the digital pictures of your last vacation, and programs such as Microsoft Office. If you shoot a bunch of pictures, the pictures themselves are just bits — software. But they’re probably sitting on some sort of memory card inside your smartphone or digital camera. That memory card is hardware. Get the difference?

Windows 11 is software. You can’t touch it in a physical sense, even if you interact with it using the keyboard and a mouse, or a touchscreen. Your PC, on the other hand, is hardware. Kick the computer screen, and your toe hurts. Drop the big box on the floor, and it smashes into pieces. That’s hardware.

Chances are good that one of the major PC manufacturers — such as Lenovo, HP, Dell, Acer, or ASUS — Microsoft, with its Surface line, or even Apple made your hardware. However, Microsoft, and Microsoft alone, makes Windows 11.

When you bought your computer, you paid for a license to use one copy of Windows on that PC. Its manufacturer paid Microsoft a royalty so it could sell you Windows along with the PC. (That royalty may have been close to zero dollars, but it’s a royalty nonetheless.) You may think that you got Windows from, say, Dell — indeed, you may have to contact Dell for technical support on Windows questions — but Windows came from Microsoft.

If you upgraded from Windows 10 to Windows 11, you might have received a free upgrade license — but it’s still a license, whether you paid for it or not. You can’t give it away to someone else.

These days, most software, including Windows 11, asks you to agree to an End User License Agreement (EULA). When you first set up your PC, Windows asks you to click or tap the Accept button to accept a licensing agreement that’s long enough to reach the top of the Empire State Building. If you’re curious about what agreement you accepted, take a look at the official EULA repository at www.microsoft.com/en-us/Useterms/Retail/Windows/11/UseTerms_Retail_Windows_11_English.htm.