About a year my sister bought a new laptop to help her with her studies. It was an HP, with decent specs that our dad helped her pick. Imagine my surprise while helping her set it up when suddenly it starts asking me to burn its restore disk.
“Didn't it come with the damn thing?” I remember asking myself at the time. If I wanted to burn restore disks I would have got a job at ACME CD DUPLICATION LTD! Clicking the bubble promptly told me it could burn the restore disk(s) on 56 CDs or 3 DVDs! Jokingly I asked my sister if she had 56 CDs sitting around, and she nearly fell off her chair (and she was 6 short anyway). Naturally we had to go and buy DVDs.
I don't know what it is about this issue, but although PC prices are coming down all the time, and although DVDs are cheap, I can't help but resent any computer manufacturer that doesn't have the decency to provide some kind of restoration media. HP and Packard Bell are the ones I've encounted so far. If the short-sighted corporate bean counters think they can save money like that, then fine, but the goodwill they are loosing is uncountable, indeed it is priceless. Bean counters have always been terrible at seeing value, always been awful at the little touches. They never go that extra mile. Instead it's snip-snip-snip.
Recently my father appeared home with a shiny new computer. A Packard Bell that he saw in his local Currys, going cheap, it was brand new, and the last one! And it was an awesome deal. He was quite excited to get it set up. We discovered upon setting it up that it wanted us to burn our 'recovery disk' and yes we had forgotten about this particular convoluted step! We nipped out to the supermarket (again) to purchase some DVDs having used them up from last time.
After that trek we got back to find that it wouldn't let us burn the restore DVD at all. Further investigation revealed that it had been pre-owned! Someone had bought it, used it long enough to burn their restore DVD and register the computer in their name, before, for whatever reason, taking it back to the shop. Since it had been miss-sold to him as new he took it back to the shop, and they were very good about giving him his money back.
After this he decided to buy a Medion that he saw at a local supermarket called Aldi. A Medion Akoya PC at a good price with a large amount of storage and decent graphics card for the latest games. Two days later I arrived at his house to find the computer sitting waiting for me to set up for him. Bless. Not that he couldn't do it himself, but it's a tradition that I get to do it. I packed up his old computer and set up the new one. It was quick and easy, just plugging in the bare essentials, checking it works, and then plugging everything else in. I set it all up in ten minutes.
It's what I found after that that nearly knocked me off my feet. As I was looking through all the things that came with it, what should I find but 3 DVDs for recovery purposes (in addition to a recovery partition on the computer)!
I was already impressed with the quality of Medion computers, and the price of them as well. But that little touch of giving us recovery disks (when the large manufacturers can't be bothered) just lifted my opinion of them through the stratosphere! Thank goodness some companies still have some decency left in them. I think that little touch goes a long long way.
