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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.'"
being able to download my OS from the internet for free!
But then you have to be more diligent in choosing hardware for your PC. Sure, a Free operating system based on Linux (Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.) supports a wide array of hardware. But if you happen to buy a piece of hardware at the store that's not on the distribution's hardware compatibility list, it probably won't include a Linux driver on a disc either. Now what?
Don't forget that the Apple Tax is completely offset by what people pay for getting a PC fixed up.
Take 3 years of operation on a $2000 Mac for a non-technical person. Other than software, it may not need a thing.
Take 3 years of operation on a generic Windows machine that costs $500. Say Windows needs to be reinstalled every six months, with infections randomly interspersed out, about twice a year. The reinstalls at the PC shop cost $100, the copy of Windows 7 costs $100 (wasn't bundled with the machine), and the cleaning of malware costs $200 each time. Total cost of machine after 3 years will be near the $2000 paid for the Mac.
For someone who knows what they are doing, this isn't an issue, but for someone non technical, a Mac may work out to be a far better bargain because they can use the machine, not have it dropped by a shop every so often.