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How To Make Dual Booting A (Bigger) Pain
the_phenom writes "Thinking of dual-booting your Windoze XP 17" Toshiba P25 laptop? Think again - this one 'uses a DVD with an already setup version of Windows XP Home and then transfers it to the notebook's hard drive,' preventing the normal setup procedure and thus, dual-booting." This reminds me of the unfriendly practice on some PC builders' parts of including an OS "backup" only on a hard-drive partition.
Back when I was a Windows admin (I've also cleaned the toilets at Burger King, which is almost as bad) it was very easy to create a scripted install so that you could just pop in a CD and it does the rest. You could (and probably still can) do this with the standard retail distribution CDs and the Windows resource kit. The real reason for these crippled "restore" CDs is to prevent people from copying them or selling them. It has nothing to do with making the installs any easier.
> Since CDs are such a terribly expensive part compared to the cost of a laptop. This seems like a really silly way to cut costs, if you ask me.
You're not used to dealing with manufacturing hundreds of thousands of something.
In those quantities, pennies count. In this context, a CD that's not needed almost all of the time is indeed an unwanted expense - multiply the cost of that CD by x00,000 and you've cut a big slice out of the overall profit of the product.
If lead time is an issue, use the CDs as an incentive to register your laptop. Check the box on the warranty registration form and you get the CDs in the mail.
Of course, requesting the CDs gives them permisson to send you tons of junk mail.