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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.'"
... 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
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 ?
That's how close we're watching costs these days?
In an industry where one is expected to lower your retails costs by 25% every year simply to stay competitive, I can't say I blame them.
If they could fit enough into the BIOS to have it connect to their servers and redownload your OS in case of drive failure, why the hell not go that route? One less plastic disk the world doesn't need.
...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".
I don't see why they don't do this anyways. And they don't need the BIOS to do it.
You have your serial number on the sticker on the box. The OEM license discs won't take the non-OEM serial.
Just publish the ISO image to their FTP site, say "here it is, download/burn it wherever", and be done with it.
The real answer is that their "built-in burn your own backup" software is a ruse: first they fuck you over not including a real recovery disc separate from the hard drive, then the OEMs (Dell especially) spam ads all over the fucking screen about buying the "upgraded backup software which will back up your personal documents" while you wait for it to burn the fucking DVD at 0.5x speeds.
Is that Apple gives you a real bonafide OS disc with the computer you buy.
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
They don't seem to advertise it, but they do. Digitalreiver hosts it for them:
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2009/10/25/windows-7-64-bit-x64-direct-download-links/
You require a license to use it, of course, but that is the software.
You can just order the disk alone from Microsoft at the Microsoft Supplemental Parts center. 800-360-7561
That's how close we're watching costs these days?
No - this is part of "encouraging" people to buy a new PC instead of fixing their old PC. Today, I am finding people that are throwing away dual and quad core PCs because the repair costs are so high.
Microsoft go out of their way to ensure that refurbishers can't just reinstall the original version of Windows. They make it difficult for consumers to reimage their PCs easily.
If they did that, who would buy a new PC?
> And just how the fuck do you expect a presumably novice computer user to just download an ISO image somewhere and burn it? You might as well tell them to use Linux; it would be just about as useless to them.
If the old OS is any good, it will be made easy for him.
If the old OS is crap, then he's got extra incentive to dump it.
There is no good reason why burning an ISO in 2010 should be hard in any OS.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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!".
probably because Microsoft is the one behind this mess. they want you to purchase a new computer with a new copy of Windows or go out and purchase a new licensed CD. They don't want standard Windows installation discs on the market because it is easier to find a product key to use than it is to get a working Windows install CD.
Remember when you got a copy of the standard installation discs with the PC? You could get the OS installation, not a modified and customized imaging-only type of CD but a full installation disc. Microsoft got the idea that if you had that disc, you would install it on many computers even though it was illegal to do so. Then came the custom installation or imaging CD which only worked on your computer or one exactly like it. Windows activation followed and then the elimination of the CD all together and only a recovery partition which was tied to your boot sector so installing Linux or any other OS or boot manager meant your recovery sector was useless.
To follow Microsoft's marketing speak, 'Customers have asked for a simpler way to install Microsoft Windows and we believe putting the software on the fastest media, the hard disk, is what's best for the customer.' It's all bull and more talk to best scrap your wallet clean. IMO
Me, I just download an ISO from ubuntu.com, linuxmint.com, fedoraproject.org, opensuse.org, knoppix.net, etc and move on.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Actually no. I was going to build my own system for my video editor replacement. But I could not touch the price of buying a prebuilt ASUS PC and the parts to upgrade it.
for the exact same hardware I could not buy my i7 processor, motherboard, and 8 gig of ram for the price of the same + case+DVD drive+1TB hard drive + Win7 license..
Either Newegg is price gouging, or the pc makers are really undercutting everyone. Plus I got a Win7 OEM license I was able to sell for $100.00... Oh and ASUS gives you a Microsoft OS install DVD.. and the COA sticker peels off easily because it was too new to set.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The stickler in this is that crapware merchants pay PC vendors to have their stuff shoveled onto machines, so it will be present everywhere unless one installs from true OS media. So shipping true Windows media isn't in the PC company's best interest because it means fewer installs and fewer chances of getting handed cash when someone upgrades or activates the crapware.
> The discs are not "recovery discs", but full blown copies of the operating system.
>
> Worth the tax to me.
No they aren't. They are married to the particular model of Apple they came with. They're no more useful than a Sony recovery disk.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
To add a ten-year old gripe to that, why is it that the web browser and the media player are "part of the operating system", but hardware support for CD burning didn't come along until XP, and support for common cd standards, such as ISO format still hasn't become common?