The Recovery Disc Rip-Off 551
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.'"
Not necessarily a rip-off (Score:3, Interesting)
Usage (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Micro$oft (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's down to the cost of one disk? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:HP Does this ... (Score:1, Interesting)
Bought an HP Pavilion about 5 years ago, and this ONE TIME ONLY burn deal on the recovery disc was true back then. Also true back then: the crappy CD/DVD reader supplied; couldn't handle DMA mode or some such nonsense. One couldn't play an audio CD without pauses about every 10 seconds. At least the latter was a cheap fix.
Anyway, I successfully made my one-and-only recovery set, but there's no way in h-ll I would rebuild this thing with the bloatware and obsolete drivers and everything else that came "pre-installed" for me. Simply horrendous experience getting rid of it all. Ugh.
Hard disk failure? Unlikely... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's down to the cost of one disk? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It's down to the cost of one disk? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a better idea.. Why make DELL eat the cost. Microsoft can get off their asses and ship dell 22 billion OS install DVD's Those asshats are raking in the money faster.. How about dell having the balls to tell MSFT to shove it and supply install Discs.
Honestly Michael Dell rolls over for Ballmer every time. Get some ca-hones Mikey! Microsoft will feel it pretty hard if you tell them to go pound sand.
Re:Ah the joys... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's down to the cost of one disk? (Score:1, Interesting)
Replying to my own post here. :-
I doubt anyone's reading at zero, but just in case
The reason we ran into this problem is that windows is not fully configured on a new retail machine. It actually completes the install process the first time the user starts the machine - in theory. In practice, we'd get someone every few weeks with a HP laptop who tried to start the machine without connecting the charger first, or turned it on to see if it worked, and turned it straight back off again. In both cases, the loss of power before the install completed trapped the machine - the installer had marked the install as finished when it clearly wasn't.
On subsequent startups, Windows would try to load, fail, and restart the process. If you tried to use the restore partition to recover the machine, it would still try to start the base install as a step in that - and as a result it became impossible to start or recover the machine without third party tools.
Of course, retail's a fast moving environment, and we didn't normally have the time to try and fix it. We'd just replace the machine (assuming it was returned within the DOA period) and send the dud one back to HP.
Re:It's down to the cost of one disk? (Score:4, Interesting)
If the burn even works. I have a Compaq laptop that came preloaded with Windows Vista. Tried burning the recovery because I wanted to wipe the drive, reclaim my 8 gigs by deleting the recovery partition, and install Ubuntu. It would get through 99% of the burn and then just fail randomly. After going through half a dozen DVD-R's, I just gave up.
I had this happen with an HP too.
On a side note, I ended up giving it away. It overheated too much and would freeze or shutdown. I had to use external cooling from an over-sized fan with everything placed next to the window on a cold night. The recipient placed in on two ice packs for setting up Windows.
Re:It's down to the cost of one disk? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Am I really the only one who would rather they put prices up by 25%, but supplied reliable hardware and a clean OS installation with original media?
I would be perfectly willing to pay a higher price in exchange for good quality products, where the hardware doesn't fail after only a year or two, the drivers don't get abandoned because a new OS I don't care about came out six months later, the software doesn't routinely crash or leak sensitive data, etc. Unfortunately, hardly anyone in this business seems to make such products any more.
Re:It gets worse (Score:1, Interesting)
Same here, my Acer laptop's HDD was DOA out of the box. Rather than shipping it back to Newegg or Acer I called Acer and they shipped me a new HDD after some escalating (can I talk to your supervisor?). HDD came blank, and they refused to sell me the recover disk. Only way to get an OS on it was to ship it back to them. It told them no thanks and put my MSDNAA copy of 7 Pro on there after downloading all the drivers from Acer's website.
I do have to admit, of all manufacture's websites I have had to deal with, Acer's was the likely the easierst to get drivers from once you find out exactly which model you have (actual model number is different than the sticker on the box or top of the laptop, its in very small print on the bottom of the notebook).
Re:It's down to the cost of one disk? (Score:3, Interesting)
+1. Even if the cost was 50% more so the PC makers can actually provide the following:
A decent quality level of components. Caps ready to bust are so 2000-2002.
A level of phone tech support that is decent (no script readers that hang up on the customer if they can't find where to go on the flowchart).
Printed manuals. PDF files don't do squat when there is no machine to read them.
CD-ROM media, as well as read-only USB flash drives so machines without CD-ROM drives can be recovered.
Ideally, a purchased PC should have:
Hardware RAID (not hardware-assisted RAID), and two mirrored drives for the boot OS. This way, Joe Sixpack can lose a drive, but still be able to browse his pr0n.
A decent power supply that is way underused so it can run quietly.
A drive (or mirrored drives) which are used by a preinstalled backup program for nightly backups. This way, Joe Sixpack can be told to "put recovery disk in the drive, boot, click 'restore', go to the sports bar, and after a few Bud Lights [1], it should be back to where it was before the data loss."
I sort of miss the days where computer shops were Mom and Pop businesses similar to how bike shops are today. It wasn't perfect, but there was something about having someone to physically come to, should computer problems happen, that made those shops worth patronizing. The closest thing we have these days to this is the Genius Bar at the Apple Store.
[1]: Using beers as a temporal unit isn't exactly a precise way of doing things, but explaining to someone that setting up backup software and installing an external HDD is a one beer job, versus a reinstall which is a five beer activity gets the point across.
Operating System (Score:3, Interesting)
``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.
Re:How many people actually registers crapware? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's down to the cost of one disk? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yours too? I've got an HP Pavilion DV6000-series that's nearly as bad. If I don't prop the back end up (the fans point down and to the back, rather than just back--WTF sense does that make???) it overheats and shuts down if I play a flash video in full screen. Hell, sometimes it does anyway. It's a pretty high-end laptop, or was at the time, but gaming is only a possibility in the winter with the thermostat set on 60.
Re:It's down to the cost of one disk? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's about double for a similarly-sounding spec.
That sounds like either you're being ripped off by your suppliers on the good stuff or you have access to cheaper cheap stuff than here in the UK. Every self-build system I've put together in the past decade had a 25–50% premium over what I could have ordered on-line from a large-scale manufacturer, but I don't think any were any worse than that (and they were all cheaper than what I could have bought off the shelf from the local PC World or similar retail outlets).
That said, I would happily even pay double the asking price of the typical cheap **** you get today if I could reasonably expect the PC/printer/whatever to last 5+ years rather than 2–3 if I'm lucky, and if came with a clean OS install, working drivers for everything, and with back-ups of all the basic software also supplied on original media. After all, no system I have built myself to a carefully chosen parts specification has ever failed, even after 5+ years of regular use, while the canned machine I'm writing this on was supposedly fairly high-end at the time it was bought yet has been showing warning signs of unreliable hardware since it was less than two years old. Either I've been remarkably lucky over an incredible period of time with the self-build boxes, which is of course still a possibility, or it really is worth buying the better brands of hardware and taking the time to assemble everything carefully.
However, as I get older and I have other priorities competing for my time, I don't really want to go through the self-build process any more. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any company trying to establish itself as a premium quality PC hardware supplier. Likewise, it seems like no-one really makes everyday software of what I would call acceptable professional quality any more: shipping bug-ridden, hard-to-use junkware and then patching later (or not) has become the norm in the Internet age. Maybe there just aren't enough people like me to make up for all the people who don't know any better and think it's normal for PC power supplies and hard drives to die after a couple of years, printers to stop working because a toner cartridge says you've printed the allowed number of pages with it even though it's still half full, and software to crash and lose your document/spoil your game/whatever at least once before you can finish what you were working on. :-(