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Thread ID: 35399	2003-07-11 05:44:00	Recovery Cd - PC Company - Time for a lawsuit?	DMcKenzie (4203)	Press F1

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
158838	2003-07-11 05:44:00	Hello everyone, I am looking for some advice to a problem that I have and I welcome everyones input and opinions. //-// I bought my computer from the PC Company in 2001. A while ago I upgraded my computer and put in a large, new hard drive. To get the computer to recognise all the space on the drive I had to flash the bios. That all went well and I have been using the computer fine with Windows XP. Just the other day I tried to install Windows Millenium on a different partition, using the recovery cd I was given with the PC when I bought it. It just kept coming up with an error saying "You cannot use this cd on this computer". I have even tried installing it on the previous hard drive that came with the computer, still a no-go. I was thinking maybe the cd needs some special code in the bios to install. I would prefer a proper cd with Millenium Edition on it. Not one of these crippled "recovery" cds. My warranty with them has expired but surely they should have to give me a working OS as I paid good money for it. Anyway I emailed the PCco. and this is a copy of the response I got: // Hi There The Product Recovery Disk is the OEM version sold with OEM computers. This CD is "locked" to PC Company computers only, as per the "OEM licensing requirements" put in place by Microsoft. Because you have flashed the BIOS, you have deleted the "patched" version that allows the CD to function on the PC. In order to get the CD to function again, you will need to take the PC to the nearest showroom where a technician can flash the BIOS. Because this is not a warrantable issue, you may charged for the service. We are not able to give to you patch required to run the CD on the computer, as it can only be used by PC Company in order to help stop privacy, as per the OEM agreement. We do not carry nor sell retail versions of Windows ME as we are an OEM computer manufacturer only. However the OEM regarding is the "same" as the retail, except it is "locked" to PC Company computers. // What a load of rubbish! They want me to send my computer back to the nearest repair place which happens to be 300km away, and they want me to pay for it as well. Imagine the courier prices alone for such a trip, all at my expense. I could buy a new copy of ME for that cost. From what I've heard in numerous forums, their repair services take about 3 weeks. This is completely unacceptable and I will not be wasting valuable work time doing that. They should give me a full refund for the money I paid for Millenium, or buy me a proper copy. If someone can't add new hardware to their computer without having to go through all this, then why buy a computer in the first place. I'm certainly not going to be buying from this company ever again and will reccommend to everyone I know not to purchase from them either. They'll lose 100 potential customers in a week. For the 3rd largest distributors of computers in NZ, you would think they have better service than this. This reminds me of the Rainmaker by John Grisham - Deny, deny, deny! Anyway, I've finished my rant so what do you think people? Time for a class action lawsuit you reckon? ;)	DMcKenzie (4203)
158839	2003-07-11 05:56:00	It is "unfair" but that's the way it goes with OEM supplied computers and software. These things are not pointed out when purchasing such computers. People should try to negotiate a purchase price for a computer without any pre-installed software and then buy their own retail software if the OEM deal is not to their liking. Else just accept the pre-installed stuff and go out and buy your own retail versions. If you build your own and buy a motherboard and cpu , you can often buy full OEM OS at the same time (not a recovery CD). You would have no show of success in any legal action, sorry.	Terry Porritt (14)
158840	2003-07-11 05:59:00	When you purchased your PC it would of been clearly indicated that the Operating System was an OEM version only. The inclusion of an recovery disk is standard practice amongst large PC manufacturers instead of the actual Windows disk. It is unfortunate that because you have flashed the bios you are unable to now use this recovery disk, and also since you live some distance to the nearest showroom you need to return it by courier. BTW, you should only need to courier the box only and not the whole PC - the courier charge for this is not much, and certainly not equivalent to the cost of a retail version of ME. Perhaps you could suggest in future to the PC Company that they include a warning about flashing the bios rendering the recovery disk unusable?	Jen C (20)
158841	2003-07-11 06:06:00	>surely they should have to give me a working OS as I paid good money for it . Your purchase price included an OEM version of the OS . Thats a lot cheaper than a full version, and comes with limitations as to hardware . Thats a fact of life, and is likely well covered in the EULA . There are ways around this (but too late for your case now I am afraid) . One is to use a program such as "ghost" to take an image of your system, and then restore this onto any new drive . This is the method I use, and it means recovery disks are not required, and BIOS versions do not matter .	godfather (25)
158842	2003-07-11 07:14:00	That does sound a bit off! The company I work for sold hundreds of PC's with Windows ME on them (with recovery disk) and I have flashed the BIOS on some of them before doing a restore and it always worked fine. IMHO I don't think that flashing the BIOS should stop the recovery CD from working. As you have found out there was a problem with the old BIOS of not being able to detect the bigger HDD, and to fix this you had to update the BIOS. Why should you have to go back to an older version just to get the OS back on?? Compaq's / HP PC's and Toshiba and Acer Laptops all had Windows ME recovery CD's and I updated BIOS on those too and still had no problems running the recovery CD's.	CYaBro (73)
158843	2003-07-11 07:16:00	Forgot to say that the PC's sold were OEM software (i.e. that company's own recovery disc and not a standard Windows ME CD) so I'm pretty sure that the recovery process would be similar to PC Co.	CYaBro (73)
158844	2003-07-11 08:07:00	just want to make something clear here . the OEM version of windows is different to a recovery disk . you can actually buy an OEM ver, most smaller sellers sell them . basicly they are a retial disk without the fancy wrapper and are not keyed to the hardware in any way . a lot of recovery disks are keyed to the hardware, no doubt a requirement of MS . if you change the hardware then it won't work . tuff go buy another OS cd . some brands are known to be worse . with some a simple change of a hardrive will render the recovery disk useless . thankfully you have a recovery cd not a recovery partiton .	tweak'e (174)
158845	2003-07-11 08:34:00	> thankfully you have a recovery cd not a recovery partiton. Hardly a cause for celebration :p Why should this guy settle for sending his pc back to the company so they can flash it with an inferior bios consequently making his new hard drive stop working?? Can we look up the consumer purchasing act (or whatever), ignoring EULA's for a minute?? Isn't there a clause in there somewhere saying you sell them crap and you gotta give them a refund?? Its not working as it was advertised?? Could this person say, download WinMe from p2p (if anyones actually dum enough to waste bandwidth sharing it), and use the cd-key that came with their computer? That should be legit?	PoWa (203)
158846	2003-07-11 09:01:00	> Can we look up the consumer purchasing act (or > whatever), ignoring EULA's for a minute?? Isn't there > a clause in there somewhere saying you sell them crap > and you gotta give them a refund?? Its not working > as it was advertised?? What PC Co did here was quite legal and was very common (I don't think it is so common anymore), and they've done nothing wrong. The money spent bought the computer and a license to use the supplied software on the computer. The computer has now changed, but the license hasn't, so technically he's not licensed to use it on that computer anymore anyway. > Could this person say, download WinMe from p2p (if > anyones actually dum enough to waste bandwidth > sharing it), and use the cd-key that came with their > computer? That should be legit? No, that's piracy :) Mike.	Mike (15)
158847	2003-07-11 09:12:00	Time for a lawsuit???? It's been over a year already Micheal - get over it.	Tobas (224)
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