Vista Backup CD?

[stendec04]

I have just purchased a new HP Pavilion Desktop from Furtureshop. The guy there told me that when i buy it with Vista Premium Home Edition on it, it does not include a Vista CD, like XP did when you bought a pc with XP loaded on it.
He tryed to sell me some package that the tech's there will set my computer up and then burn me a backup of Vista OS, incase i ever want to reformat my hard drive and reload vista on to the pc. But that service is another $100.
Is there a way that I can make a backup of the OS myself?
Any help is appreciated.

 

[Blind Dragon]

From what I understand you can use this. http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/index.html

Backup your entire PC
Acronis True Image includes our patented disk imaging backup technology. You can copy your entire PC, including the operating system, applications, user settings, and all data. In the event of a system or disk crash, virus attack or other fatal failures you can restore the entire disk contents in minutes — no reinstallations required!

 

[SNGX1275]

I don't think the blame is on Vista like you are trying to place it. It is on the OEMs like HP and Dell. I bought an HP Media Center PC with XP MCE on it, and it didn't even come with restore disks, although there was some included software that would create your HP Restore Disks for you if you had a couple blank CDs. It DID NOT come with a stand alone XP install disk, and afaik OEMs haven't done that at all in the last 10 years. Now maybe if you specifically requested and paid more you could, but all that the OEMs will give you is a restore disk, and sometimes not even that.

 

[stendec04]

when i bought my HP Pavillion Laptop about 4 years ago, it came with an original licensed XP cd. And everyone else i know that bought computers from big companys in the last 4-5 years got original XP cd's. But not with vista.

 

[Route44]

I bought my daughter an HP/Compaq for college and Vista allows you to burn one (1) recovery disk. I am not sure if it is the same thing. Staples wanted the same thing for $139.

 

[Blind Dragon]

you can use any vista boot disk, put in YOUR license. Then it tells you your key is already in use, you ca tll microsoft explain what happened,ell them this is the only computer you use it on, and they give you some numbers to type in.

at least thats what I did, when I replaced basically everything except harddrive

 

[Route44]

Good stuff there, Blind Dragon.

 

[Blind Dragon]

oh, and it doesn't matter if its basic, premium, ultimate, whatever. Because your license is what unlocks features on the disk

 

[SNGX1275]

when i bought my HP Pavillion Laptop about 4 years ago, it came with an original licensed XP cd. And everyone else i know that bought computers from big companys in the last 4-5 years got original XP cd's. But not with vista.

Well that is interesting then. I've bought 2 branded computers. One was in 1998, it was an HP. It came with Windows 95 on it, and I got a 98upgrade disk. I think it only came with that because at that point everyone was already selling 98 and I was buying a refurb. In any case it came with the 98 upgrade and then came with 2 restore cds, that were Windows 95 based.

Then fast foward until 2005 or 2006, and I bought another HP. This time with Windows MCE. It didn't come with any disks. It had a partition on it that contained restore data, this was great if your Windows installation crapped out, but was worthless if your hard drive died. So you had to run a utility provided by HP that converted their recovery partition to 2 recovery CDs.

So apparently HP had a little bubble of giving you legit cds that I was unaware of. Maybe if that slipped under my nose then perhaps Dell also did the same.

This is news to me if you were getting stand alone Windows install disks with an OEM purchase.

 

[som1dies2nite]

Download it!