and I SUPPORT Dell!

[shifuimam.livejournal.com]

So my boyfriend, who's a self-employed small business IT consultant, recently got in on one of those $750 off Dell Dimension deals - he wanted a new gaming/secondary machine. It showed up this past week, and we found out something remarkably stupid.

Dell doesn't include operating system and drivers CDs with their home (Dimension + Inspiron) machines anymore. Apparently they're trying to cut costs just that much. Instead, once you've rebooted your computer at least five times, a new shortcut appears in the start menu that allows you to make a "backup CD". You can only burn this CD one time, and it creates a bootable CD to reinstall Windows, along with all of your device drivers.

Dell doesn't tell you this, unless you call tech support. So, you know what I see happening to way too many stupid users? Turn the computer on, don't turn it off for weeks, get some kind of massive spyware/malware infection, and suddenly you need to reinstall Windows. Forgot to make that disk? Can't boot your computer? Computer simply running too slowly to do anything? You have to actually call Dell and have them mail you a recovery CD.

All that bullshit for a $0.02 CD. You have to select it as an option when you buy OptiPlexes and Latitudes, now.

This is almost as bad as eMachines' bright idea to only include a "recovery DVD" that forces you to reinstall all their crappy software when you want to reformat your hard drive.

What really gets me is the having to reboot five times thing. I guess they want to make sure you're not going to return the computer after you burn the CD, which makes no sense since it's probably like all other Dell CDs in that it checks to make sure your computer is a Dell before running.

/rant

Comments

[xdownfornowx.livejournal.com]

$750 off?!?! wow, i missed that one. nice deal though. HP has been doing the same thing for a while. Half of the eu I got on the gateway phone didn't know where the CDs where in the first place. So I guess it isn't that big of a problem. Nice thing about GW is that you could not give/sell recovery disks after like 2 months from the original purchase. I've also noticed other compnies making a recovery partition on the hd. Not a bad idea until a virus wipes the drive. My idea is that we force the world to go broadband and make people netboot if they fuck up their stuff eliminating the recovery disk all to gether. Well, a guy can dream right?

[jecook]

Yep.

All the major players did it at one point. Packard Bell was the among the first.

My SOny VAIO laptop is the same way, along with my work laptop (a Winbook J4), the pair of HP Pavilions, and the mountain of Gateways.

At least I got CDs. But this??

Compaq did that for a while with the presarios, along with Packard Bell. Compaq probably stopped doing it (Don't know, I have not dealt with a new one of those in a very long time) and We all know what happened to Packard Bell.


FWIW, the XP Re-install CD that shipped with the dells that I've seen only work with the Dell OEM product keys, and nothing else. Ain't that nice.

The Sony recovery cds for my laptop not only check the model of mahcine, but refuse to run if you've installed anything other then XP home (have not chekced against XP Pro) so you can't restore the applications that came with it...

[indigo-max.livejournal.com]

I noticed this with the Optiplex's that we get in at work. The newest shipment of GX280's didn't come with the driver or resource CD that I am accustomed to. Course it came with the software CD's that had been installed on the bloody thing. Makes it hell for me to produce a folder on our Tech shared area to put drivers.

Max...

[pleaseremove.livejournal.com]

the reason that when you buy an xp machine from a manufacturer you only get a recovery disk, or not even that, sometimes just a partition or something is because Microshite asked them to, to stop people spreading their copy around. Its bloody annoying, its not for cost cutting reasons at all.

[dr-atheist.livejournal.com]

I've tried deleting that partition before. As you can't see it, you can't bloody delete it. Of course it is meant to be resiliant so you can format and re install, but there should be some remove option.
(I was trying to install WIN98SE on a machine that perviously had ME on it, worked fine until I tried to network it, could ping it from another machine but that was it, in hindsight i should have knoppix'd and rm -rf but hey, live and learn)

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

There's ways around it. Computer Management I believe will unhide and hence let you remove this partition if you wish, as well as using a HD utility to write the drive back to zeroes. Quite honestly nobody would want this to be an easy option. Lusers do enough stupid things to their computer without a great big "if you click this icon you'll fuck up your computer" button.

[dr-atheist.livejournal.com]

Stupid me thought fdisk would kill it, but alas.

[compwizrd.livejournal.com]

they did a 750 off 1500 on their laptops as well.. pick out a 1300 dollar laptop, add 200 dollars of accessories(not too hard to do!) and thne you get it for 750..

but it's still a dell...

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

Our vendor quotes a cost savings of approximately $2 per system sold for not pressing 3-4 CD's or 1 DVD. For a company in financial trouble, especially if MS is willing to throw some money our way for doing it, we're gonna be grabbing our ankles and smiling as the customers complain.

Then again, the threats of moving our jobs to other outsourcers have been hot and heavy lately, even though this is pretty much standard fare from our client. But as call volumes drop as summer approaches and people actually go outside and play...

Re: Yeah....

[jecook]

Yep, it was a crock.

There were a few class action lawsuits because of those pesky warrenty stickers...

[katyism.livejournal.com]

wow. i bet they have a sweet deal with microsoft for that. more people buying windows cds at full retail, YEAH!!!!

< /sarcasm >

[cynicalinsanity.livejournal.com]

Actually, press ctrl+F11 during startup and it'll boot to a Norton "image restore" partition... they started it with the Dimensions and Inspirons last fall... AND you can get the cd's and all if you call and ask...

[cynicalinsanity.livejournal.com]

It still sucks though...

[ex-deliveryboy.livejournal.com]

you have one of the greatest icons ever

[shifuimam.livejournal.com]

Depends. I have several Dells that shipped with XP Pro CDs, and they were OEM/pre-activated copies that worked on multiple computers. They only run on Dell machines, though, regardless of the make/model. I had a C600 I bought through Dell's DFS eBay store, and the win2k CD that came with it did require a key.

[shifuimam.livejournal.com]

Right...but how many computer-illiterate college freshman do YOU know who would think of either of those two things? The only thing they know how to do is put the Windows CD in and reboot their computer.

[oggsmith.livejournal.com]

thats why i purchase licenses for my persona;l preference of OS and then when if i get a new computer that wasn't built by me i just install fresh anyways. at work we purchase all of our computers without OS so we never have this issue anyways. but you have to love Select versions of M$ software anyways.

Re: Why not

[dr-atheist.livejournal.com]

well, like I said, I should have knoppix rm -fr'd it's ass to oblivion, but after I'd got a linux install (mandrake) on it and working I no longer cared about those 2 gigs. Anyway I don't have the machine any more.

[torkell]

My IBM came like that, but on the plus side it's hard for me as admin to mangle that partition, let alone some nasty. I'll give you a hint - they load a device driver or two, which means I have to either as admin find and unload the drivers before attacking the partition, or I have to use something like a DOS copy of PartitionMagic to fiddle with it (I'd guess that a raw partition table editor would probably do the trick).

They also protect the backups folder with the same trick (backups used to be done to the service partition). And you can get them to send you the rescue disks, or burn them yourself whenever you like, as often as you like.

Still, you do get worse in the way of recovery disks. A friend's computer I worked on came with a genuine copy of WinXPh, on a CD labelled "Recovery Disk". Which is all very well until you realise that it's got SATA drives.

[pleaseremove.livejournal.com]

i tried explaining to someone who has no idea what SATA is, how to get the drivers on and working.....i have to say, it was harder than i thought

[twitchfetish.livejournal.com]

basically it's a specific type of partition that's rendered invisible to the OS completely. viruses can't touch it, unless they're superclever-specifically-designed-to-f*ck-with-IBM ones...

on the new machines, you can only burn off a set of recovery CDs once, then the option disappears, but Rapid Restore will let you burn backups as much as you want. no it doesn't make sense. no i don't know why. i've only worked for them since the recovery partition thing came into effect.

the above post was right btw. we don't do recovery partitions coz we want to. we do them coz M$ hath decreed and we hath Bent Over and Assumed The Position™.

...the number of times someone has asked me why their 20GB drive only has 12GB free...RTFM motherfuckers.

oh, and i don't know about the States, but in Australia, if you wish to purchase a recovery CD, it costs you 80 bucks. no questions, no excuses, unless your HDD went the way of Dubyas synapses...

god i need a new job...

IV

[torkell]

It's certainly not 80 bucks over in the UK else my dad wouldn't have sent off for a set for his laptop.

[shifuimam.livejournal.com]

IBM's recovery partition is nice, I'll grant you that - if you need to restore to factory install and have no CDs handy, it can be rather useful.

Fact is, though, I'll always take a single XP installation CD any day over something else. I like having complete control not only over my XP installation, but over my drivers installation as well.

Screw 'em all - I'm trying to learn Fedora now so I can start being even more 1337 than I already am (as if that were possible).

[fuego.livejournal.com]

whoa...glad I do Apple...

[benatwork.livejournal.com]

Better than Fujitsu. The CD has a restore *program*, and the image is on a separate partition on the hard drive. Should something happen, and nuke your drive before you made a backup of said partition, they'll quite happily charge you in excess of $200 to re-image the drive instead of sending you the appropriate disks.

Of course, I learned all that two days after I bought the damn laptop, when the hard drive went tits-up.

[dmsalem00.livejournal.com]

THANK YOU. I was about to say that myself.

Let's be honest, folks, do you really WANT the average luser to try and reinstall Windows XP of all OS's by booting to windows and sticking the disk in?

Dell's just taking the same point of view that a) it saves money, and b) lusers can't be trusted with CDs. I've worked support for long enough to know, when their system is blue-screening, the answer to "do you have your windows CD" is 90% of the time "this thing came with CDs?"

They've still left options open that let you specify if you want them or not, and by all means, run a debug script on that new HDD with the hidden partition. It'll be blank when you're done.