BB, CC Reps Pushing Store-made Recovery Discs

[Nick]

Electronics retailers increase profits by pushing PC buyers to buy unnecessary store-made backups.PC World:

When Ian Griffith of Queens, New York, purchased an HP notebook from a Circuit City
store in Brooklyn earlier this year, the salesman urged him to have the chain's in-store
Fire Dog technicians create Windows XP recovery discs in case Griffith needed to
reinstall the OS.

"I specifically asked if this was something I could do on my own," Griffith says, and the
answer was no, with the salesperson insisting that there were only two ways to obtain
such discs: have them made at the store for $30, or buy them from HP for nearly twice
as much. ...http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,136496/article.html

[subeluvr]

Making your own disaster recovery disc(s) or having a geek, or dog, at a store do it for you can be dangerous.

The REAL test of any backup is if or how the disc(s) works when you NEED to use it to restore.

Disaster recovery disc(s) from the OEM will and do work and SHOULD be included with the machine when sold. If the OEM wants to charge for the disaster recovery media AFTER the sale then shop another brand

I would not buy any brand of computer that did not include disaster recovery disc(s).

JMO but I'm right ;)

[Mark Holtz]

The first thing that I ran when I purchase a store bought PC or laptop was to run Ghost, register, run all updates, then run Ghost again.

[Cholly]

Making your own disaster recovery disc(s) or having a geek, or dog, at a store do it for you can be dangerous.

The REAL test of any backup is if or how the disc(s) works when you NEED to use it to restore.

Disaster recovery disc(s) from the OEM will and do work and SHOULD be included with the machine when sold. If the OEM wants to charge for the disaster recovery media AFTER the sale then shop another brand

I would not buy any brand of computer that did not include disaster recovery disc(s).

JMO but I'm right ;)

Virtually ALL computers on the market today come with a hidden partition on the hard drive containing the recovery data. They did away with recovery discs a few years ago.

[Steve Mehs]

Disaster receovery means nothing to me. With HP, you've got the D partition, and then you can create recovery discs from there. I've had this Compaq for 3.5 years and have yet to create my factory DVDs, I just use the recovery partition. Don't really care if my hard drive dies, I have a grand total of 30 or 40 pictures on my computer that I also have on a flash drive, maybe 8 MS office documents I keep saved and as for music, I can always transfer that from my iPod back to a hard drive. I never save anything, I have 15.6GB out of 160GB used. I do a full destructive factory restore every 2-3 months.