The number of PCs sold in China containing legal copies of Microsoft's Windows operating system doubled in the first quarter from the fourth, as major vendors joined a campaign to stamp out piracy, new data showed.
Some 48 percent of PCs shipped in China in the three months through March came with legal copies of Windows already installed, compared with 25 percent in the fourth quarter of 2005, according to figures supplied to Reuters by data tracking firm International Data Corp (IDC).
The big jump came as the country's major home-grown vendors, including Lenovo Group Ltd, Founder Group, Tsinghua Tongfang and TCL Corp, signed a recent series of landmark deals agreeing to load legal copies of Windows onto most or all of their PCs sold in China. Lenovo announced the first such deal late last year, with most of the other companies following suit in the spring.
Many such vendors previously sold PCs with free operating systems such as Linux or none at all, in what many saw as an invitation for buyers to take those PCs out to small shops where they could then have pirated copies of Windows installed.
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