Bring back the Restore Disk!

My first visitor for the day has a brand new ACER laptop computer. The ACER people have discovered a brand new way of keeping prices down and customers' hackles up.

In The Good Old Days, computer makers used to provide a 'restore disk': a CD or DVD that would re-install the operating system and all the programs, thus 'restoring' everything back to as-new, straight-out-of-the-factory condition. This meant that, if your computer got infected with a bad virus, your hard disk got damaged, or you accidentally deleted your Registry, it was easy to set everything back to normal.

Those clever people at ACER, however, realized that supplying such a CD or DVD disk cost money, so they economized by putting the restore disk on the hard disk itself. By this simple step, they save you, the buyer, the cost of a CD (say, 50c), but leave you without any easy means to restoring your software.

Now, I don't want to single ACER for criticism: Dell and Hewlett-Packard seem to be doing the same thing. It seems all the major manufacturers have decided to thumb their noses at their customers.

And I don't want to criticize any of these companies unfairly: for the technically savvy, and those with lots of money, there are ways around this problem.

For anyone with lots of money, the best answer is quite simple: don't buy from any of these manufacturers. Buy from a supplier that provides a genuine Microsoft Windows disk, or (if such a thing still exists) a supplier that provides a separate Restore Disk with the computer when new. Sure, this might add a whole extra 50c or so to the price, but heck, 50c is a small price to pay for an easy life!

Alternatively, you can go to the companies after you have bought your computer, and ask them to post you a restore disk. You can ask - but you may not get. Indeed, unless you ask very quickly, before your warranty runs out, you probably won't get. But if by some miracle they agree to send you a disk, you will discover that it will cost you something like $60!

Meanwhile, what about for the technically savvy? For such people, there are two major options.

The first option is to burn a copy of the restore disk off the hard disk, and onto a CD or DVD. I tried this recently with a Hewlett-Packard machine. They had thoughtfully put some software on the computer just for this purpose. The purchaser of the machine, who was a first-time user, had absolutely no idea how to use the mouse, let alone how to burn CDs. Presumably Hewlett-Packard expects their customers to celebrate having saved themselves 50c by hiring a technician for $50 to burn them a restore disk. Not that it mattered much, because the software didn't work properly. So in this case I moved to the second option.

The second option is to buy, download and install some backup software such as Acronis True Image, and burn one's own restore disk. For the technically savvy, this is, of course, the very best option - but for somebody who is yet to learn how to use the mouse, it is not exactly a practical choice.

So what is the take-home message?

If you are technically savvy, or are buying for a business with its own IT Department, feel free to buy from any of the big manufacturers. Otherwise, give them a miss. Their prices may look low, but that's just because they skimp on essentials.

In the end, saving yourself 50c may be the most expensive thing you do this year!