Windows XP Home on Advent 7081 Laptop - ARGH!

09:24.37 - Thursday 20th March 2008   (Link to This Entry)

What kind of logic process does it involve to purposely upset and annoy your customers with crippled products for the sake of a few pence?

A friend of ours was was unfortunate enough to suffer a harddrive failure on her Advent 7081 laptop - not a bad machine really - rendering the drive as dead as the proverbial Dodo. The laptop wouldn't even POST properly, so I took the drive out - sure enough it got further and asked for a valid media to be inserted. To be double-plus-good sure I stuck the 2.5in drive on an adapter and put it into my main machine. The drive didn't even show up in the device manager as being damaged - it was completely dead, so I ordered a new one from eBuyer, £40 delivered next day, 80GB. Sweet!

First problem: No restore discs. We hunted high and low for the system restore discs but there was nothing, nor was there a Windows CD anywhere to be found. No, instead of including a few pence worth of plastic, Advent had thoughtfully put the restore sortware on the harddrive. The harddrive that was now dead. Ahahah, great!

So I acquired an original Windows XP Home OEM CD and stuck that in there, but the licence number on the bottom of the laptop - a perfectly legal number supplied with this actual laptop - won't allow this version of XP to install. I now have the choice of [a] buying a new XP Home pack from somewhere, [b] getting a new set of restore discs from Techguys on 0870 901 6000 (which costs about £30), or [c] trying to find either of the above on eBay.

Who on earth thought this was a good idea? At what point in the marketing progress did someone think it would be OK to screw over future users because it would save the cost of a CD? Not only does it make things awkward, but it uses up HD space that could otherwise be used by the laptop owner. Sheesh!

Moral of the story: Don't buy a laptop with the restore stuff on the HD. If you have no choice, get something onto removable media ASAP in case you need it.