Back in and before the 80s and probably the 90s a Briggs and Stratton
engine on a lawn mower. The engine would out last the deck it came on.

A few years back I purchased two self-propelled walk-behind lawn
mowers from Walmart. They had a little bit different Briggs and
Stratton engine but basically the same. A couple of years later
neither will run right. Either the engines are special low cost jobs
just for Walmart, to have that cheaper than thou price, or new Briggs
and Stratton small engines are bad. Walmart is big enough, too big for
my britches, to probably have B&S make a more cost effective engine
just for them. Either way, I will never buy another major purchase for
Wally-World and I will never buy another piece of equipment with a
Briggs and Stratton engine one it. When mentioning I had priced a
Husqvarna rotate tiller. On with a B&S engine and one with a Honda.
Both people knew more about power equipment than I and both
immediately said go with the Honda even with a price tag that was $100
more.

What I'm saying is I believe Walmart is big enough and buys enough to
have companies make special modifications to the products that cuts
the cost to them. It may look the same, have almost the same model
number, as somewhere else but is it? Having computers manufactured
with a special BIOS so the OS cannot be easily changed, modified or
added to will save them the hassle of having deal with PCs returns
that someone like you or I have messed up by installing Linux. Another
vendors netbook may work fine. A few year ago I purchased an ACER
Asprie One, or is that One Asprie, anyway I had no trouble adding
Ubuntu to it. Last summer, 2010, I purchased a ASUS netbook from Best
Buy and had no problems adding Ubuntu 10.04, currently 10.10.