Читать книгу Windows 10 All-in-One For Dummies - Ciprian Adrian Rusen, Woody Leonhard - Страница 17

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 DVD drive (remember those coasters with shiny sides?). Software is everything else: 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 camera. That memory card is hardware. Get the difference?

Windows 10 is software. You can’t touch it. 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 a gazillion pieces. That’s hardware.

Chances are good that one of the major PC manufacturers — Lenovo, HP, Dell, Acer, or ASUS, for example — or maybe even Microsoft, with its Surface line, or even Apple, made your hardware. Microsoft, and Microsoft alone, makes Windows 10.

When you bought your computer, you paid for a license to use one copy of Windows on the PC you bought. Its manufacturer paid Microsoft a royalty so it could sell you Windows along with the PC. (That royalty may have been 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 7 or Windows 8.1 to Windows 10, 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 10, asks you to agree to an End User License Agreement (EULA). When you first set up your PC, Windows asked you to click 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, www.microsoft.com/en-us/Useterms/Retail/Windows/10/UseTerms_Retail_Windows_10_English.htm.