H
Homer J. Simpson
An acquaintance of mine just bought his first laptop--he's not a complete
n00b when it comes to using PCs, but let's just say he felt more comfortable
having me go shopping with him to make sure he didn't get scammed.
Anyway. Long story short, when we went to the store to pick it up, he
wanted to power it up before we left just to make sure everything worked,
etc...of course, by doing so, being an OEM machine, the first thing we got
prompted with was to complete the Windows setup (it came with XP Pro).
So we did that, took roughly 5 minutes, then the next thing to come up was
some prompt to backup the system state to CD/DVD--with the salesguy pointing
out that this is where you get to create your own system recovery disc
(UGH!) because one doesn't even come with system (not unheard of).
Obviously we didn't want to go through burning a disc then and there, so we
skipped that part and proceeded to verify the basic functions (at the
request of my acquaintance--I didn't feel that to be particularly necessary
myself. But, he's the one spending the money...)
We get back home, turn the laptop on, download the 100+MB worth of updates
(he can only get dialup), and once that's done, I'll be damned now if I can
find that program that lets you create that backup disc. So we skipped it
for now. And to be frank, I'm no fan of these system recovery discs that
force you to blow away your data and redo your partitioning to the match
original state (and typically comes with a few gigs worth of crapware you'll
never need). To make matters worse, I realized only a minute before I left
(when I already had my jacket on) that the silly thing is preconfigured to
use FAT32; I didn't feel like staying an extra half hour to do the
conversion, so I left it at that at that point. I'll do that later.
In any case--my actual question--if his system actually dies at some point
and the OS has to be reinstalled, he's without any media. Am I gonna able
to use one of my MSDN CDs and do a clean install on his system off of
that--entering, of course, *his* OEM key?
n00b when it comes to using PCs, but let's just say he felt more comfortable
having me go shopping with him to make sure he didn't get scammed.
Anyway. Long story short, when we went to the store to pick it up, he
wanted to power it up before we left just to make sure everything worked,
etc...of course, by doing so, being an OEM machine, the first thing we got
prompted with was to complete the Windows setup (it came with XP Pro).
So we did that, took roughly 5 minutes, then the next thing to come up was
some prompt to backup the system state to CD/DVD--with the salesguy pointing
out that this is where you get to create your own system recovery disc
(UGH!) because one doesn't even come with system (not unheard of).
Obviously we didn't want to go through burning a disc then and there, so we
skipped that part and proceeded to verify the basic functions (at the
request of my acquaintance--I didn't feel that to be particularly necessary
myself. But, he's the one spending the money...)
We get back home, turn the laptop on, download the 100+MB worth of updates
(he can only get dialup), and once that's done, I'll be damned now if I can
find that program that lets you create that backup disc. So we skipped it
for now. And to be frank, I'm no fan of these system recovery discs that
force you to blow away your data and redo your partitioning to the match
original state (and typically comes with a few gigs worth of crapware you'll
never need). To make matters worse, I realized only a minute before I left
(when I already had my jacket on) that the silly thing is preconfigured to
use FAT32; I didn't feel like staying an extra half hour to do the
conversion, so I left it at that at that point. I'll do that later.
In any case--my actual question--if his system actually dies at some point
and the OS has to be reinstalled, he's without any media. Am I gonna able
to use one of my MSDN CDs and do a clean install on his system off of
that--entering, of course, *his* OEM key?