Click Click Clicky (part 2)

This kind of qualifies as an amendment to the last Click Click Clicky article, as I had an experience with a customer that just begged to be added here.

One of my friend’s aunts had her laptop in the shop this week because it wouldn’t boot up correctly.  We found that it had a bad hard drive.  We installed a new hard drive for her and were able to restore it using the recovery CDs that she had retained from when she purchased it.  All in all it was a pretty smooth operation.

This brought up an interesting thought though:  More and more I am seeing new brand name machines not coming with recovery CDs.  What used to be standard fare with any computer, desktop or laptop, that you purchased is now extremely rare.

If you read the fine print on your name brand machine, (pretty much all of them now are doing this) you may find that it says something to the effect of: “Please run BrandX utility to to create recovery CDs or DVDs”.  Basically these companies, in the effort to save about $1, have elected to put all of the recovery information right on the hard drive.  They usually give you a utility to use to make this recovery into a set of CDs or DVDs at your convenience.  The problem is that normally this utility is buried way down in a submenu somewhere and is very difficult to find.  So you never make the set of discs.  And then your hard drive crashes.  And nothing can be recovered.  And now you have no recovery discs by which to reload your computer with Windows and all of the other programs that came with it from the factory!  Oh the misery!  And the kicker is that brand name maker of your laptop will probably charge at least $25 plus shipping to send you a new set of discs.

So, the moral of the story is:  If you have a brand name computer, make SURE that you look for that utility and make those discs!  You will thank yourself in the long run.  Oh, and on a side note, all new UNI Computers always come with the Windows CDs/DVDs to reload the operating system, we feel it’s the right thing to do, even if it does cost one extra dollar