Last week, Microsoft Corporation applied for a patent concerning a pay as you go scheme that entails charging users for the software they run as well as for the computing horsepower they put to use.

The application, which is named the „Metered Pay-As-You-Go Computing Experience,” was filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office and it takes the form of a plan that would meter software use and access to computer hardware.

According to Microsoft’s document of request for a patent, users would be charged based on a prepaid or billed account.

The company’s pay as you go scheme is aimed at monitoring a computer in terms of disk storage space, processor cores and memory used, so as to afterwards charge the system’s user for what he has consumed during a given time-frame.

Microsoft said that the fees would be low for low-performance tasks such as writing e-mails or web surfing and higher for high-performance chores like network-based interactive gaming.

Even though the tech giant stated that the user would benefit from the advantage of having a powerful computer and still be billed only for what he consumes, it also admitted that where the overall cost was concerned, it might exceed the one for a standard PC purchase.

Microsoft called the key behind the entire pay as you go plan a „security module,” which is set to be embedded in hardware or provided to the user as software, aimed at monitoring the computer’s usage.

Furthermore, the security module would also serve to lock the PC to a specific supplier, very likely to an Internet Service Provider, the company added.