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The Recovery Disc Rip-Off
nk497 writes "The chances of finding a recovery disc at the bottom of a PC box is getting slimmer, as vendors instead take the cheaper option of installing recovery software on a hard disk partition, leaving the buyer with no physical copy of the operating system they paid for if (or when) the hard disk fails. Users can burn a backup disc, but many aren't as diligent as they should be. While some PC vendors will offer a free or cheap disc at the time of purchase, buying one — or even tracking one down — after the fact can be expensive and take weeks to arrive. 'I've had a lot of people that have had this problem,' said David Smith, director of independent maintenance company Help With Your PC. 'One customer recently found his hard drive had gone, but by the time he'd paid £50 for the recovery disc, paid for a new hard drive and paid for the labour of installing the device, it made more sense to buy a new machine.'"
That's how close we're watching costs these days?
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
... how many Windows "pirates" actually own a legitimate product key but have simply no install CD/DVD.
I think the real goal is to make it more difficult to get away from the manufacturer's preinstalled bloatware.
why can't MS have easy to get iso's for windows that just need your key that is on the COA so you don't need to torrent the iso?
This is indeed one of the most infuriating things about purchasing a new computer. How much money can it save? Surely the manufacturing cost of an optical disc produced in bulk is in the noise compared to producing and shipping a laptop? Heck, Canonical will ship you a disc with Ubuntu on for free, so it can't be that pricy.
Actually, perhaps the Linux zealot faction should welcome the "no OS discs" trend. Faced with a machine where you have had to replace the HDD, it is nowadays much easier to obtain and install Linux than to get your hands on the media from which to re-install Windows.
...but every Mac I've ever bought has had install discs for the OS and any additional applications in the box. They are rarely needed, since Time Machine does a fantastic job of providing a backup that I can restore to, but they are there.
That in itself might be worth the so-called "Apple Tax".
Is that Apple gives you a real bonafide OS disc with the computer you buy.
When you make a backup, you're also enshrining all the crapware the computer comes with. This guarantees that should the drive fail, your crapware shall not perish, but shall have everlasting life. That's probably worth an extra $10 to the manufacturer, so there's no way they're going to bear the cost of a disc plus lose the extra $10 they can get from the crapware-advertisers.
1) You can remove the partition easy enough.
2) Are you hurting for disk space on a new system? Hell I just bought a laptop a couple months ago and it has 500GB of disk space in it. A *laptop* has that much. Desktops are no problem to get with 1TB or more. Are you really going to miss 10-20GB of that?
I mean I reinstalled my laptop with Win 7 Pro, instead of the included Home version, but I left the recovery partition. Why not? It isn't a problem or anything.
Personally I like what dell does with thier buisness machines. The discs they ship (at least the XP ones, I haven't tried the vista or win7 ones) are windows install CDs (not "recovery CDs") that use the normal windows installer, don't insist on wiping the hard drive, don't seem to install andy crapware and yet provided you install them on a dell they will install without any activation BS.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Wrong assumption on saving money. This could be looked at as a method to drive sales of Windows. Rather than wait for a recovery disk to be shipped, how many people will just drop the system off at BigBoxTechSupport and pay for a clean install -- and how about we upgrade your Microsoft to Windows 7 also? Microsoft sells another license, the retail support department has more sales, and the system owner does not have to know anything about how the system works.
Just like taking the car to the dealer for service. What could be more natural?
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Actually, it's doing a fair amount of math to transcode from CD format into MP3. You're also beholden to the underlying IO system and how much it can keep up with you in terms of buffering and the like. Also, Windows 7 has a crap load of annoying extra services running on it that need to be tuned down (like the indexer) that chew CPU time.
See, now you're just being an asshole. My wife has no interest in running Linux. I've got Linux, FreeBSD, XP, and Vista boxes, but she doesn't care. I'm certainly not going to start picking fights with her to tell her how much cooler another goddamn OS is. Maybe if you had a wife, you might understand that point.
It really is assholes like you that give the rest of OSS people a bad name. Yeah, we get it, linux is teh r0ck3rs. Blah, blah, blah.
Seriously, shut your pie hole and stop being such an arrogant, smarmy git. Not everybody gives a shit about Linux, and being a mindless drooling fanboi doesn't help anything. Windows and other OSes have their places as well. Cope.
God, sometimes I really hate listening to people who just mindlessly repeat the notion that Windows sucks and that all of the l337 people are using Linux. Go eat your crayons or something if you have nothing intelligent to contribute to the topic.
I learned that lesson with all PC makers. That is why if I get tasked with helping someone with a new PC, first thing I do is boot it from a Knoppix CD, plug in an external drive, and both tar and dd off the partitions. This gives me an image I know will work. Then I boot a TrueImage or MaxBlast CD and use that to image the partitions. The reason I do both is that for a novice user, TrueImage is easier to use, but I know the Linux dd image is able to put back exactly how something was laid out, sector by sector in case a PC maker decides to an attempt at DRM.
After that is done, I boot the machine, make the recovery DVDs (preferably onto dual layer DVD+R media), then make ISO images of those.
It sounds like a lot of work, but it ensures that the machine's software can be put exactly into the state it was when it was opened.
Of course, after I do all of this, I boot Knoppix again, dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda, zeroing out every nook and cranny of the drive, then install the OS of choice from scratch. One of the first and fundamental rules of system administration is never go with what is preinstalled, unless it is a custom OS load just for that box from the factory.
> - I can't make Flash work on Ubuntu, even though I've tried numerous times. It keeps saying something about, "Not enough permission."
Then you aren't really trying. You aren't actually sincerely trying to make it work. You're just trying to make it fail. You just want something to whine about. You're just a troll.
It doesn't get any easier than a vendor repository managed package.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You've already been told by the other guy but -
Compared to the latest incarnation of windows (7), linux is dreamlike for hardware compat. That scanner (and any accompanying printers) are more likely to work under linux, and without having to download a hundred megabytes of crap from a support site, if there's any support at all.
WLAN is a similar story and a friend has just had to go buy another card because he switched to win 7. And 3d is fine now, thanks.
Look, if you don't like linux for some reason then fine, nobody's forcing you to use it, but your arguments are out of date.
"See, now you're just being an asshole. My wife has no interest in running Linux. I've got Linux, FreeBSD, XP, and Vista boxes, but she doesn't care. I'm certainly not going to start picking fights with her to tell her how much cooler another goddamn OS is. Maybe if you had a wife, you might understand that point.
It really is assholes like you that give the rest of OSS people a bad name. Yeah, we get it, linux is teh r0ck3rs. Blah, blah, blah."
hahahaha, well said. i wish i could be bothered logging into slashdot anymore and had any mod points because i'd push you up through the roof. there really are too many asshats in love with the feeling of superiority that using linux can, bizarrely, give them.