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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Monday, January 21, 2002
23:58 - Well, so much for HP and IBM being "good guys"...
http://www.silicon.com/bin/bladerunner?REQUNIQ=1011684729&REQSESS=2529431&13000REQEV

(top) link
Hewlett-Packard and IBM have recently decided, in their infinite wisdom, not to include Windows XP recovery CDs with their newly-shipped home PCs. To save on the extravagant cost of a CD, they've elected instead to load the contents of the CD onto a hidden partition on the machine's hard drive.

You know, for easy access when the user needs it, like after the hard drive crashes and its contents get wiped.

Whose brainstorm was this, I'd like to know? PC customers are already up in arms, and the set of silicon.com articles that the above link goes to chronicle their patient and largely futile efforts to explain to HP and IBM the concept of why you ship recovery data on CDs-- namely, that it allows you to reinstall the operating system that you already paid for from a piece of incorruptible, archival media. You don't store the archival information on the media that the original is on, you complete mindless idiots! Who runs your IT departments? How do you back up your corporate files-- by copying them to another folder on the same disk? Good God.

"I bought HP because they stood for quality and getting a good piece of equipment for the value," one Pavilion user wrote on HP's message board. "When cutting corners like this starts affecting the morale and attitude of customers, then nobody wins."

Indeed. Except maybe Dell and Compaq, and of course Microsoft (who gets to sell you a new $199 copy of Windows so you can recover from a hardware crash).

Guess those price wars are really taking their toll, eh? Hope everyone's enjoying their $499 computers.

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© Brian Tiemann