One of those often neglected jobs when you buy a new computer is to burn a recovery disk. Most of the time, you won’t need one, but you could be taking a serious risk if you skip this vital task.
Many PCs these days ship without a Windows disk: you just power it up, and you’re up and running right away. It saves everyone money: unless you need to reinstall your operating system, you’ll never need a disk, so why ship it. And even if you do need a Windows disk, you can just borrow one off a friend, so it really doesn’t matter if you don’t bother to create a recovery disk. Or so you’d think.
Last week, we had an HP tower brought into the store with a dead hard disk and an expired warranty. We fixed the drive right away, but that’s when the problems began. We have almost every variety of Windows disk in store, but no matter what we did, we couldn’t get his computer to recognize a standard Windows 7 disk.
After frantic calls to HP support, it turns out that some HP computers don’t use generic Windows disks. They use their own HP-specific disks, and without those, you can’t get the computer to recognize the disk drive, and you can’t install Windows. HP said they could sell us a recovery disk for $15, and for an extra $15, they’d rush it to us. Three days later, they told us that the disks were now on back order, and it would be another two weeks before they could ship it to us.
Our customer was understandably upset. As a small business owner, he couldn’t afford for his computer to be out of action for over two weeks, all over a $15 Windows disk.
Our recommendation is simple. When you’re buying a new computer, check to see whether recovery disks are included. If they are, then store them in a safe place in case you need them.
Otherwise, make sure you create a recovery disk right away. You never know when you’ll need it.
If you’re unsure how to make a recovery disk, then call us, and we can burn it for you. It’s quick, it’s easy, and it could save you a lot of problems.
