Slashdot Mirror
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.
Almost every laptop sold nowadays only come with restore cds, they never EVER come with a full copy of windows. HECK nowadays HP and Compaqs just have a partition called RESTORE PARTITION, and thats the only way to restore them because they come with NO DISKS! You have to contact HP or COMPAQ to request them for a small fee. And even then, they are only restore cds. Basicly your just paying for a licence. Which means legally you can go to Kazaa and download a Win2k ISO and just use the licence you payed for. Simple....
keanmarine.com
Why not just borrow a full install disk of XP from a friend? Surely this is a good example of fair use, considering you already own a license to the operating system, albeit a different copy.
[ home ]
Dell lets you go through a standard OS install. And it is because of OEM licensing. M$ apparently doesn't produce OEM CDs for their OEMs, telling them to make their own. Dell's CD simply checks to make sure you have a Dell BIOS on the system, so you can only use the CDs on other Dells (vendor-specific, not model-specific).
My sister and I bought identical HP computers a while back, and after some troubles we needed the rescue CDs, and HP was more than happy to send rescue CDs to us, just not the right ones. Long story short, I have 6 sets of rescue CDs in my office that do me no good, and a company I'll never buy computer parts from again.
The other problem is that with the model of HP I had (and assumably most other models as well) you had to buy a special copy of windows directly from HP (presumably with a huge markup on an already over priced product..) in order to get most versions of windows to work at all.
Moral of the story is, plans like these hurt the consumers and help create/maintain monopolies. It's too bad THESE situations wouldn't get taken to court...
Shoot Pixels, Not People!
My sister and her husband bought an absolutely horrendous piece of crap Packard Bell several years ago. It came with one of these lovely discs that wipe your HD and restor it to a "factory state". (Windows, with a sheitload of annoying, not to mention buggy, PackardBell spam and adware)
At some point the computer finally gave up and collapsed under the weight of all the spamware it had been subjected to. They gave me a call and asked me to come over and take a look at it. I told them I'd pop over later on in the evening. Unfortunately, my brother-in-law decided he'd try to fix it before I got there... with Packard Bell's image disc. Financial records, their digital cam photo collection, my sisters grades (she's a teacher), and a thousand other useful things... Gone. Toast. Whoops! I took a red magic marker (the kind teachers seem to have oodles of) and labelled the offending disc "EVIL!". That was about all I could do.
I'm sure my sister and her husband are not the only tech-unsavvy people who have fallen victim to these image discs of EVIL, and they've never even heard of Linux! These discs have been around for quite some time and I'm sure any manufacturer that uses them gets plenty of tech-support calls as a result. The only reason to use these discs seems to be that they let manufacturers include all sorts of annoying and useless software with their name on it. Frankly, it's a stupid practice and it hurts more than just Linux users.
Just to totally avoid pure FUD, I feel a few things should be noted:
2.) Toshiba's have a problem of having their own "helping" software that when you boot with a net connection it will call home and download "updates" automatically for you. One such update was for my model to cut the clock speed in half.
This was for Intel's Speedstep tech. This cuts the CPU down when the machine is idle in order to conserv on battery life. Mhz programs will read the CPU as half-speed, because your machine isn't doing anythign else...which leads to:
3.) Every toshiba I've owned has horrible battery life, you might as well consider them a computer with a built in UPS and easy to move around, and not a "portable laptop".
I'm not saying it was right for them to force those updates on you, but I hope you can at least see the connection.