Hi. I bought a Dell PC recently and received NO recovery CD. Instead I received a piece of paper cut out in the shape of the CD (instead of an actual CD) that says to use the Windows XP "recovery feature" which is a recovery "image" of the HDD stored on the HD[?]. Did anyone receive this fake CD from Dell without warning? If my HDD should blow up and I need to replace it, then I won't have the backup image anymore. Has anyone dealt with this problem? Thanks.
Does this help? How Do I Create My Operating System CD using the Dell OS Recovery Utility? http://support.dell.com/support/top...kb/en/document?dn=1091713&c=us&l=en&s=gen&cs=
Hey, thanks. That helps... but would help more, except I didnt order a burner for this PC (don't need one, so I thought) lol... I understand Dell wants to sell the lowest price $ PC... but I think it's outrageous that they didn't warn consumers before about this, after all -- storage failure/corruption is not a rare event, especially when dealing with large files. but then again grandma that orders a dell probably doesn't need a recovery CD for her ebay and email. Another lesson in "you get what you pay for"... ugh.
I just last week received a new Dell with that paper cd. I called and asked for the OS cd, applications cd, and drivers cd. All 3 were sent overnight for free. Just have to ask.
I recently bought an eMachines PC... same situation. They don't send you the restoration disks and expect you to make ONE copy when you first start up the machine.... the entire process must save them all of $3, but aggravates the hell out of the user. Apparently, this is the "new" way of doing business... and it sucks. You PAID for the OS and software, yet they lay this sort of crap on you. Perhaps nothing you can really do about it, as they all are subscribing to this penny pinching. I believe you can call them and order the "disks you should have received with the machine"... in Dell's case, I've heard it's free. In eMachines's case, it's also "free" but there's a $20 handling fee. Given this shit-ass choice, I opted to buy Acronis True Image 8.0 from Newegg.com for $29.99 rather than pay eMachines $20 for something I ALREADY PAID FOR. (I talked to eMachines support on the phone and suggested I might return the product for refund because I was pissed at the arrangement. They said, "we don't care"...... and THAT'S the basic "bottom line".)
My 2 cents of wisdom: Since the upcome of the PC, I have bought and supervised hundreds of units. From the earliest brands like Compaq and others, I observed that their OS software maintenance packages were almost designed to make these units effectively unserviceble. For this reason I have over the years adopted a policy of only admitting genuine Intel (Asus may do as well) motherboards PC's running from exclusively genuine M$ OS cd's. This policy has served me extremely well as compared to the load of crap that these 'branded' solutions slip into your computer installations.
Correctamundo! Just wait until you need to restore a .dll file and all you've got is the pile-of-crap, 6-disk amorphous, full of junk, CD set.... Or worse yet, you don't even HAVE it and have to pay the vendor to sent it to you for a "handling charge".
We have got two IBM laptops and we had to pay for the "recovery disks". However we like IBM because their "update connector" is about the best automated software update facility that there is for the hardware. Maria