HP customers furious over missing XP recovery disks - If you break it, buy another one...

Silicon.com ^ | Thursday 10th January 2002 12:43pm | Sally Watson

[Petronski]

Once created, the hash information cannot be calculated back to its original values.

This part, I do not believe. Of course, I'm not an XP customer anyway. 98SE serves all of my needs.

[tophat9000]

That's utter rubbish. BG's BASIC interpreter was pirated from day one, and he took a serious stand against piracy from day one, and that's where the Hate Bill "movement" began -- and grew, like cancer.

Horse Pucky! Bill and MS got fat off piracy. They had no problem look the other way when IBM's BIOS was cloned. It would been very simple to only let his OS work with authorized IBM bios only.

If any one got screw in the long run it was IBM and Microsoft got fat on it

In addition there have been dozen of copy protection scheme (over the phone lock and key, doungle on parallel port, etc.) the all been used and flopped.

Not because they did prevent piracy, they did, but they flopped because were a pain to use and end user prefer a noncopy protected app.

For ever app Microsoft sells today you find there once was a competing copy protected app that died.

[justin4bush]

MS better get the word out to Dell then. My new computer came with an XP disc.

Justin

[Harrison Bergeron]

I'm not an MS basher or Gates hater... I knew MS was coming out with XP, I was disenchanted with the authentication issue, had no interest in the "toy" look and feel, and I chose to throw my money into Win 2000. As it turns out, Win2K benchmarks slightly better than XP, even for gaming if you install service pack 2. I think I made the right decision. If you wanna upgrade, I don't think you'd be unhappy with Win 2K.

[Don Joe]

"Horse Pucky! Bill and MS got fat off piracy. They had no problem look the other way when IBM's BIOS was cloned. It would been very simple to only let his OS work with authorized IBM bios only."

Whoa, calm down there cowboy!

First off, the only commercial "cloned" version of IBM's BIOS was the short-lived Columbia. Oops, scratch that -- it should have been "second off", because the actual "first off" is best expressed in a question for you: what part of "IBM did not negotiate an exclusive license" don't you understand?

OK, moving right along...

Third off -- why on earth would MS -- the owner of the OS that they licensed non-exclusively to IBM, Compaq, Corona, etc. -- only allow their product to work in one slice of the market pie?

Well? I'm waiting. This oughta be good, *chuckle*!

"If any one got screw in the long run it was IBM and Microsoft got fat on it"

...

Not because they did prevent piracy, they did, but they flopped because were a pain to use and end user prefer a noncopy protected app.

Help me out here. I'm having a hard time figuring out if English is not your native tongue, or, if you're merely spitting mad over this stuff.

[PogySailor]

The PackardBell of the 21st Century!

LOL, I had one of those two! Now I've gone back to my roots and build my own systems.

[rdb3]

You are insane if you believe what you wrote about me. I didn't rant at all. So what on earth are you talking about?

Bush2000 can admit that I'm no knee-jerk Microsoft detractor, and I don't have an ideological bent against Gates & Co. I've probably forgotten more about Microsoft OSes than you have ever learned. So don't bring that nonsense to me.

And since when did the market cry out for pirated software? That's criminal, and I don't condone that.

Get a grip, paht-nah. You apparently don't have one.

[rdb3]

I agree with you that the new XP authentication setup is puzzing. Even my wife won't buy the home version of XP due to that (and she is far from being a techie).

But I'll step in to say that Bush2000 is good people, even if he does work for the "Evil Empire." ;-)

Believe you me, there are some terrible MS shills here who seem to want to lick between Bill Gates' toes to ensure that he has no toejam!

[Bush2000]

This part, I do not believe. Of course, I'm not an XP customer anyway. 98SE serves all of my needs.

You might want to leave this to the computer scientists, lightweight. One-way hashes are not that complicated, not that interesting, and have been around forever.

[Bush2000]

Bush2000 can admit that I'm no knee-jerk Microsoft detractor, and I don't have an ideological bent against Gates & Co.

This is true. rdb3 has always been reasonable in our discussions.

[Bush2000]

There you go folks, that's the official Microsoft position - coming from a Microsoft employee - on customers with negative comments...But seeing them employ mindless internet surfing drones like yourself to harass and ridicule legitimate criticism of their products just makes me wanna puke.

Congratulations! What an amazing leap of logic to conclude that someone who supports MS must necessarily be working for them -- but wait, there's more -- and paid to surf for negative comments! Your Mensa application is in the mail.

[Timesink]

Your posts on Microsoft are too stupid to warrent a response, that is why you are ignored.

Winner of this skirmish: Publius!

[Timesink]

There you go folks, that's the official Microsoft position - coming from a Microsoft employee - on customers with negative comments.

Bush2000 is a Microsoft employee!???! Boy, does THAT explain a lot.

[SamAdams76]

I think the decision by HP to scrap the recovery disk is a lousy one. The article misses the most irritating part of all of this. The "recovery" partition takes up a whopping 11Gig of space. So if you buy a system with an 80Gig hard drive, only 69Gigs are available to you when you take the system home. Now that is a crappy thing to do!

[jackbill]

What do you expect when a company names a woman as CEO?

[Leroy S. Mort]

Last I heard 50% of XP upgrades have failed.

Got a source for that?

[SamAdams76]

PC cams that previously worked fine are no longer usable. Digital camera software used for a year or two previously will no longer install and run on the new computer. Scanners, will no longer work.

Well, DUH! If your friends RTFM, or even ran the XP compatibility wizard, they wouldn't have had to tear their hair out. It is a well known fact that drivers and software compatible with Win98 and before need to be upgraded for XP, because XP is a BRAND NEW operating system that is not necessarily backwards compatible with the drivers and software from previous systems.

Your friends are like most people. They are too damned impatient to take a few extra minutes to do things right. That's why there are millions of VCRs out there with the date flashing. Then when things go wrong, they quickly blame the manufacturer. Computers are very sophisticated devices and they require a little knowledge and patience.

[dcwusmc]

bump for later

[Servant of the Nine]

I put LINUX on a new Pavilion 7965 Dual Boot at the start of Dec.
I bought Win XP Pro to upgrade.
I contacted HP to get the HP add ONs that run the CD Burner, etc.

I got back the single snottiest letter I have ever received from anyone about anything. Essentially they said that if I had messed with the operating system they had installed, XP home, then I deserved to have no CD Burner and they would not help.

So9

[SamAdams76]

But the absolute worst "feature" is the Win XP authentication routine that talkes a snapshot of your system hardware, stores it via the internet at Microsoft HQ in Redmond, then shuts your system down if you upgrade your computer significantly enough to make it look like a new machine.

I bet you that never happens. If Microsoft started shutting down systems because Joe Six-pack made one too many upgrades, it would be a PR disaster of epic proportions. I think it is more likely Microsoft is using the "snapshot" for marketing purposes.