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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.
My wife recently bought an HP laptop. It comes with the recovery stuff on a partition.
You get one time you can burn a physical recovery disk. When we tried it, the process failed. Leaving you with no more tries at a recovery disk, and no recovery disk.
Very annoying. Combine that with the performance of the laptop, and we won't be buying anything else from HP because they're products are overpriced and crappy. Ripping a CD created MP3 with really bad jitter and noise -- lame for a dual core machine which wasn't doing anything else at the time.
Posting anonymously because my wife works for HP and we bought it using her discount. :-P
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?
Personally, I have never used a recovery CD. When I buy a PC - I do not need or want the recovery CD (It just fills up cabinet space). If this cost is unbundled (and I'm not saying it is) - I'd prefer to pay a little less and not receive the physical media.
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
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.
Pfff... I never like recovery discs. Every grain of personalisation is gone since the company you bought the computer from placed their wallpapers and custom themes all over the place. Even worse, the harddrive is littered with trials of virusscanners or other advertisement software. Always had that personal drive for your music? It's gone! The last recovery disc I used also 'restored' they drive mapping replacing all partitions to make it factory default again. And there is nothing you can do about it. No settings, no parameters you can set. C drive was wiped like it should, but forget about other partitions and everything on it aswell.
I HATE recovery discs. Just do it yourself by loading a boot diskette/USB/other external device and install a clean copy of your favorite OS which mostly can be ripped from the recovery disc themselves.
I think it's just to save a nickel on each unit.
My el cheapo Acer laptop was set up this way. The pre-installed software had a utility that creates a recovery disk, which I did almost immediately after buying the machine, then I threw the (2) disks into a safe. Problem was, it never really asked me to do it. I just stumbled on the utility.
I don't really see anything wrong with the practice personally, but the manufacturers should be much more forceful about telling people to burn recovery disks. There should be some kind of a nag screen when you first start up the machine warning you to burn them and keep them in a safe place.
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.
You mean that you haven't noticed that Windows has a hardware compatibility list as well ?
no physical copy of the operating system they paid for if (or when) the hard disk fails
I know very few people who have recently reinstalled their OS due to hard drive failure. On the other hand, I know quite a few people who have had to reinstall their OS because their OS was a craptastic pile of failure that in one way or another became unusable due to non-hardware issues.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
...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.
The discs are not "recovery discs", but full blown copies of the operating system.
Worth the tax to me.
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
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.
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.
I recently bought an ASUS netbook which not only came with no recovery discs, but no utility to create recovery media (either optical or USB). If the hard disk dies or the recovery partition is corrupted (e.g. by a failed test restore of your self-created drive image), there's no way to restore the system to its factory state yourself. This has been raised in the ASUS forums and their response is sorry, but you have to return the system to them if you need it restored. Remarkably, people who noted this issue in Amazon.com reviews had their criticism thumbed-down, and ridiculed by "most helpful" reviews containing the narrowminded suggestion that recovery media is unecessary because you can "simply restore from the hard disk!".
it probably won't include a Linux driver on a disc either. Now what?
Well, there is the internet.
Actually, though, more often I find the opposite scenario to be true. Most hardware "just works" with Linux, but for Windows you need to install stuff from the included CD. You may be loading just a driver, or you might be installing whatever additional spyware/adware/nagware/crapware the hardware vendor (or some 3rd party) wants on your machine. But as long as it "works", you won't know or care.
I have nothing (well, a few things maybe) against Windows itself as an OS, but the ecosystem surrounding it is an unmitigated cesspool. The people who swim there see the big chunks of poop floating around, but they think that's just the price you have to pay for a day at the beach (and, of course, you get what you pay for). You'll never convince them to try the clean, cool pond just over the hill, because, well, they'd have to climb that damned hill to get there.
People that can actually research things.
I was smart enough that when I wanted a new webcam I used the internet thingy and searched. I found the Microsoft Lifecam HD works under Windows, Linux and OSX perfectly... yet the box says "WINDOWS ONLY!! HOW DARE YOU ASK ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE!!!!"
I used my brain and made a educated purchase. I guess those that are incapable of doing anything but looking at boxes get to miss out on a lot.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
> - 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.
``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''
I don't know if this is still the case, but the last time I took a look at this recovery software, there wasn't any way to install the operating system I paid for, either. This was several years ago, and the recovery software came on a separate CD. However, when run, this would actually overwrite your harddisk with some image which did not match the installation as shipped, nor matched an actual OS install - where you can, for example, use separate partitions for the OS and your data.
Failing disks are a problem, but these sorts of recovery software add a new and unnecessary problem: if, for whatever reason, you need to recover your OS, they will also wipe out all your data and installed applications. That's not recovery, that's destruction! Of course, I know about partitioning tools that can split partitions while keeping the data, and I back up my data, so I can work around the breakage, but it's still annoying.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
From what I see, people end up registering the stuff that pops up in order to get it to shut up. The usual antivirus program for example that pops up notices that the end of the world will happen because it will stop getting new definitions in 30 days. If they knew better, they would be pulling that stuff out and installing Microsoft Security Essentials which is provided by MS at no charge, but provides as good AV protection as everyone else.