Text 26976, 57 rader
Skriven 2007-01-18 09:25:24 av Alan Zisman (1:123/789.0)
  Kommentar till text 26958 av JAY EMRIE (1:123/140)
Ärende: Not here !
==================
In article <28759$WIN95@JamNNTPd>,
 "JAY EMRIE -> ALAN ZISMAN" <1:123/140> wrote:

 JE>>>>> My eyes must be better - MS stuff is in my Add/Remove!!!

 JP>>>>        I was referring to my daughter's new Dell here, Jay. My own
 JP>>>>   homebrewed Athlon shows it all too. I wonder what was changed in
 JP>>>>   the Dell setup to be this way ?  We might be better off doing as
 JE> you
 JP>>>>   are, to delete all from the HD and do a personal instal.

 TW>>> That would be IF dell provides a REAL Windows CD. A Lot of Computers
 TW>>> nowdays are shipping with a Restore CD. And than rest0ored ALL the
 JE> junk
 TW>>> one may not want and you have NO choice.

 AZ>> When I ordered my Dell laptop last June, the online order process
 AZ>> included an option to get a Windows CD (which I chose) or a restore CD--
 AZ>> I believe each had a $10 fee... as an experiment, I just went back to
 AZ>> dell.ca and repeated the process of (pretending) or configure/order the
 AZ>> same model (actually its replacement- now with a Core 2 Duo in place of
 AZ>> the Core Duo I got).

 AZ>> There no longer appears to be options for any sort of OS or restore CD--
 AZ>> at least nothing I could find. I don't know if that means that the
 AZ>> system ships with one or the other- or with nothing. (The summary page
 AZ>> includes "Also Included with your system: - Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.0
 AZ>> (note- 2 generations old), Integrated 10/100 network card and modem"...
 AZ>> this would seem like the place to list "restore CD" if this was included.

 JE> Alan, they are probably taking a clue from IBM (or vice versa). The
 JE> entire contents of the normally installed (and actually installed) is in
 JE> an unavailable (to the user) partition that has to be activated by a
 JE> "redo". I've done that twice with ny laptop - experimenting.

Even though I didn't order a 'restore' CD with mine, it has two hidden
partitions... a small (500 MB or so) FAT16 first partition, and a large
(6 GB FAT32) partition at the end of the drive... these are revealed
using partition management software.

I think the small first one is used with Dell's media-playing feature--
it has a button to use to play CDs/DVDs without booting to Windows
first... though installing Linux and Vista seems to have disabled this
feature (no loss to me) by rewriting the boot sector.

The larger partition is probably the 'restore' partition-- I know they
have downloadable software that can be used for the restore-- when I had
to contact Dell support for a problem with my previous laptop, they
wanted me to start out by restoring, in order to demonstrate that it was
a hardware problem, and not the result of any user-installed software.

-- 
- email: alan (at) zisman (dot) ca
- website: http://www.zisman.ca

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