My friend just bought a new Compaq computer and he's a novice when it comes to computer parts so he has no idea what he had just bought and will just believe what the salesperson tells him he's getting. I went over to his place to check this new computer and it was nice, but he didn't have the winXP OS disk. Isn't it standard that the store gives him the winXP OS disk? All they gave him was a system recovery disk and a couple of games and other utilities. I told him he should go back to the store and make sure he's not missing out.

I know when I have to install or update softwares, I'm usually asked to insert the OS disk as well.

Not all new PC's have to come with a copy of the OS.
A lot of stores actually charge extra for this. The PC might be setup with the windows cab files on the Hard disk so that when it requires them the OS doesn't request a CD. I am not sure about how the Microsoft "activation/registering of your copy" system implemented in WinXP affects this, whether or not he should have a physical copy of the software, I don't know. Where did he buy the PC. You could check their web site for information about this.

Last whole PC that I bought I got the same thing. No windows CD, but that was a WindowsME machine (Eeewww).
Infact if I go back to the first 486 that I bought, I didn't get a copy of the OS either, just an installation on the computer

I agree with Arris. Sometimes having the OS CD comes with extra costs. When a friend of mine bought a laptop last time, it came with Win98. However, the installation files weren't in a CD. It was copied to the hard disk. Not sure who was the genius who did that.

It was in the news about this a good while back.
If you search on google.com you should find it, but I think the basic conclusion was that Compaq said if you want XP on a seperate CD (not just a restore one) you'd have to call them.

all the majors do that; restore disc w/ proprietary version of OS

indeed.... some kind of program that writes an image (a bit like drive image) back to the system, complete with drivers and so forth....

We get a lot of PCs delivered to work which have the exact same as your friend has had given to him.

CAB files are copied to the machine's hard drive and then the OS is installed from there, so that the location of the CAB files is the default install path, and then if the OS requires access to these files (for altering network settings, or example, loading extra components or foreign language support) then this is loaded from the CABs on the hard drive.

If it has a CD writer you could burn the CABS to CD quite legally, I think, so long as you did not install it on another computer or give it to someone else.

Sometime early last year, Microsoft pushed the all the major computer manufacturers to stop including an OS disc with their machines. This was done in an attempt to stop piracy of Microsoft's product.

I believe 2000 was the last year that Dell included the OS disc with their machines. This is probably the reason that your friend only has the 'restore' disc with his machine.