on returning a notebook to Fry's yesterday, I asked the tech how much Vista itself was the cause of the return - "most of the time" - and whether the rate of return under Vista was higher than XP - "hugely"
another huge mess, according to him, was that few people spent the three hours making recovery disks when they buy Vista - so they either rma the machine if less than 15 days or charge $$. but this is consistent with MS strategy over the years - poor design on their part leads to larger profits by their vendors - so who's complaining?
Posted Apr 13, 2009 16:37 UTC (Mon) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071)
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The lack of reinstallation media is a choice made by the OEMs, not Microsoft. The OEMs want to save money on printing the media by making the customer do it.
Of course, you can't use customer-burned reinstallation media when they return the laptop anyway, because you don't know what they did to the laptop before they burned the recovery image DVD. How many nice bits of spyware they might've managed to download. So you need to RMA the thing anyway. I'd be *DEEPLY* unhappy to get a machine with Joe Bloggs' RecoveryAndSpyware DVD as the only OS media and a pre-used preinstall. Ick.
Personally, I think failing to ship clean-install recovery media is deeply dodgy, but it's not MS that're being dodgy.
What about Vista compared to XP
Posted Apr 17, 2009 18:55 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
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The OEMs want to save money on printing the media by making the customer do it.
I don't think the OEMs save money by not pressing the media. For the OEMs in question, price is everything. That's how they get market share. So they pass the savings on to the customer. They know that most customers, perhaps out of ignorance, aren't willing to pay for recovery media, whether in purchase price or in personal time and effort.
I don't know the rules and statistics in returns of these things, but I'll bet the various parties have figured out that it's cheaper, to society as a whole, to return a computer to the factory to be remanufactured (reloaded) in the few cases that a customer returns it than for recovery media to be created for every computer sold.