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.'"

Comments

HP Does this ...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

One Of The Best Things About Being A Mac User

[Ukab the Great]

Is that Apple gives you a real bonafide OS disc with the computer you buy.

Re:One Of The Best Things About Being A Mac User

[ducomputergeek]

Depends, how much is your time worth? Before I bought my dad an iMac, it was 3 - 4 hours every time I visited cleaning crap off his computer and usually 6 hours around christmas every year to wipe the drive and reinstall. So probably around 15 hours a year. Since I bought him the iMac and he got over the initial how to questions in the first weeks, I've spent a grand total of 2 hours in 3 years upgrading from OS 10.5 to 10.6 on his machine last christmas.

Not having to deal with that crap when I visit, worth every penny of the apple tax.

Re:It's down to the cost of one disk?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

It gets worse

[D. Book]

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!".

Re:why can't MS have easy to get iso's for windows

[Locutus]

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

Re:It's down to the cost of one disk?

[Lumpy]

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.