Not A Graceful Recovery For HP Customers

An alert reader named michael pointed out this article running at Infoworld on the policy instated by HP of supplying actual Windows XP backup media for their Pavilion only if owners really, really need them. While HP and other vendors have been moving to recovery partitions for a little while, it seems like HP customers have to jump through particular hoops to demonstrate they really need physical media, and aren't very happy about it. The article makes a good point too regarding the installation of Linux partitions. The banner ad on the page is for --guess what? -- Windows XP.

Comments

What do you expect?

[the eric conspiracy]

A last year the company I work for bought a couple of Presarios with 4 GB drives. 1.5 of that rather limited space was set up as a recovery partion. While you did get a recovery CD, the first thing that the CD did was to install that recovery partition.

The fact is that Microsoft has a monopoly, and one of the first things that this means is that Microsoft can do whatever it wants to crew their customers.

Moral Idiots?

[Alien54]

That is what I first thought.

I suspect that they do not want to have all that extra XP media out there. especially when there are tools that apparently can generate XP activation keys oby the dozen on a daily basis. [See this report on the Register for Details]

What I suspect is happening is that MS is muscling in on IP Ringhts in some way on HP via various aggreements, as seen by example here with Sony.

Re:Step 1: Buy a Mac.

[Ubergrendle]

Except... #1) Lack of software. There's not even a version of Photoshop working on OS-X yet! #2) The games are crap #3) You overpay for fixed configuration hardware #4) One button mouse? You've got to be kidding me... #5) This ain't the early 90s anymore. Quality of many of the Mac products is just as crappy now. Sorry, not a viable solution and your suggestion is barely related to the topic of this post.