Asus to stop shipping recovery discs with netbooks

Like most netbooks, Asus’ Eee PC mini-laptops don’t have disc drives. But that hasn’t stopped the company from shipping a recovery DVD with each and every Eee PC model shipped… until now. The company has posted a note on its support page explaining that Asus will no longer ship support DVDs with Eee PCs.

Asus says the move will help cut down on waste, which is true. It will also save the company a few pennies for each product shipped, which probably doesn’t hurt either.

But here’s the thing — most Eee PC models ship with a recovery disk image already preloaded on the hard drive. Just hit reboot your computer and hit the F9 key when the Asus splash screen comes up and you can recover your computer to its factory default settings. So to some degree the support DVD was redundant — and kind of useless for customers that didn’t have USB DVD drives.

Of course, if you accidentally delete the recover image on your hard drive while trying to install Ubuntu, OS X, or another operating system, this could mean there’s no going back — without obtaining a full Windows installation disc.

via Netbooked and EeeUser Forum

Posted on Friday, March 12th, 2010, 1:29 pm by Brad Linder

MonkeyKing1969

There is too much useless plastic in the world already. Like the evil patch in the Pacific ocean…The Great Pacific Garbage Patch or the Pacific Trash Vortex,

There are some days where if god strolled into my office and said, “Wipe it out or wait-n-see….your choice” I'd say start over dude this place is trashed.
Scott

Its plain greed to not give a recovery cd, if your hdd fails you will need to pay to have it done. While I agree there is to much waste, there needs to be a balance between whats necessary and whats waste.
Most everyone that mails out a bill does not have problems sending several paper ads with your bill, now that's waste.
I WON'T but a computer without one,Ive been that route with Dell before. If they don't give one away they must send one for free when requested.
Waste is considered something not needed, a recovery cd does not fit that description for me.
http://home.comcast.net/~tomleem/ BigGoofyGuy

It would make sense not have a back up cd with a computer without a cd drive. It would be nice to have the backup on either a usb drive or a SD card; both are coming down in price.

It would be neat if the operating system was on an SD card so one could either upgrade or switch operating systems just by changing the sd card. (just thinking out loud).
CyberGusa

It's a bad move, the F9 restore option doesn't always work and it's easy to damage or delete the recovery partition by accident. They should at least offer a downloadable ISO option or provide a SD or USB alternative.

We're already paying for the license to use the OS. So to me, no secure backup recovery option means I might as well just buy my own OS and buy the computer without any OS.
JK

Computers should be reinstalled via flash drive or ethernet boot.

If you want to complain about greed, complain to Microsoft. This is only annoying when it comes to Windows. Tell them to find a way to let us reinstall our machines with updated copies of Windows on flash drives or over network, just like any modern operating system allows you to do, instead of forcing us to go back to DVD's which become annoyingly outdated after a few months worth of patches and hotfixes.

Until then, not handing these DVD's out when you damn well could have partimage'd your own drive onto reusable media, including possibly an SD card, is the right thing to do.

Hell, how nonsensical is it to demand recovery DVD's for a machine that doesn't come with an optical drive in the first place? The sensible thing to do would be to complain to Microsoft.
thats dumb

i have the disk it saved me from a headake ya i dont use windows xp i rather hate it but i was trying to get mac osx to work i had everthing working great until i decided to upgrade to 10.6.8 my wife needed something done on the computer so i grabed their cd they gave because i couldnt find my ubuntu disk. and i had other xp disks but i knew this would have the drivers. sorry to see the cds go i wish all compaines gave a cd with the $$$ computer you buy you bought windows you should at least own a cd with the purchase
J. Charles

I agree with all the comments AGAINST Asus' not shipping some form of recovery media. Here's mine:
I was probably among the first few hundred who bought a 701 based on the ANNOUNCEMENT of it in the trade press.This is an idiotic thing to do, but I've never looked back. It's been the most bullet-proof machine I've ever owned, what with the SSD and extremely-well-thought-out Linux distribution and UI. I'm looking for another for me, since my wife–an evangelical computerphobe (literally never used a computer in her life)–appropriated it right after I bought it, and won't give it back.
Here's my point: I've owned the Asus for all these years, and the hardware/software combo (I did add 2 Gig of RAM) have done yeoman duty. But in 'all these years', I've also found that support from Asus SUCKS!
This newest program by Asus is right in line with what I–and, no doubt thousands (or millions)–of others have discovered about Asus.
I'll never buy another Asus, except for a used 701 or 900 series.
Michael

Probably about 75% of the time I've had to reinstall the operating system has been because of hard drive failure. No help to me that the replacement for what's gone south has gone south, too
lccurtis1

How about allowing the consumer or purchaser decide whether or not he would like the cd or other media options like sd, or usb flash.
Shannon VanWagner

This is why EeePC owners should take a complete image of their hard drive (to include recovery partition) to an external device(e.g., USB) or network location (i.e., ftp, samba share, etc.).
There's a magical and Free Open Source tool to do this with very little effort – it's called clonezilla. Get the LiveCD image from http://clonezilla.org/download/sourceforge . Read more at clonezilla.org

Shannon VanWagner
humans-enabled.com
JK

Hardware manufacturer produces a restore image. Whether or not it's USB, SD, or DVD, it doesn't much matter because they're mostly the same beast, or should be (it's an OS fault if there's really that much difference between the options, and possibly the manufacturer's fault if they choose to put so much trialware and extraneous garbage in the install image that it overflows the media).

Hardware manufacturer places the restore image online for download. Preferably via torrent, and have satellite sites provide extra distributed bandwidth for download, and even the 3rd parties can help seed.

If the hardware manufacturer is too lazy to even do that, then they at least post the official checksum of the image and just let the community take care the distribution of the image altogether.

Here's an example of how this works in the modern era:

If my Ubuntu-based machine dies, I go download a fresh install image and reinstall. I have the option of going all the way back to the original version, or I can get an updated version of the OS with all the latest upgrades/fixes. I.e. I don't have to go all the way back to the beginning and patch my way forward.

Again, I suspected that this isn't the way things work with certain operating systems because of the wishes of the makers of certain operating system manufacturers because it obviously shouldn't be a big deal for the hardware manufacturers like ASUS to do, lazy as they are.
http://www.facebook.com/ian.m.perkins Ian M Perkins

I haven't looked recently, but aren't there a plethora of tools out there to create restore images on differing media? from a fully up to date installation even? For the experienced user, it's a no-brainer. My worry is the novice user.
Slurpy

I'm glad they shipped one with my 1201N.

I have a Lite-On USB DVD-ROM that goes in my toolbag when I'm doing a repair call, in case the optical drive on whatever beat-up POS my friends/family just bricked no longer has a working drive, and it worked just dandy for reimaging my 1201N when I installed an OCZ Vertex SSD in it on Valentine's Day. Plus, it didn't insist on recreating the “backup partition,” so I retained full use of the 64 GB drive.
http://www.facebook.com/majblackburn Michael Blackburn

http://store.microsoft.com/Help/ISO-Tool

It's not magic, it's just the Googles.
http://www.facebook.com/majblackburn Michael Blackburn

http://store.microsoft.com/Help/ISO-Tool

Google. It's for winners.
http://www.facebook.com/majblackburn Michael Blackburn

Torrents are only as secure as the user that has some idea of how to use md5. Obviously, if you run linux you understand that, but it's probably easier for a large company to just buy some more bandwidth than try to educate its users about hashing. The “seedy” side of the torrent scene would never allow md5 to be built in to the protocol, as it would be too easy to trace back an infected source.
http://www.facebook.com/majblackburn Michael Blackburn

http://store.microsoft.com/Help/ISO-Tool

It's not magic, it's just the Googles.
http://www.facebook.com/majblackburn Michael Blackburn

http://store.microsoft.com/Help/ISO-Tool

Google. It's for winners.
CyberGusa

@ Michael Blackburn – “Google. It's for winners.”

Sorry, nothing new there… that's for if you buy it from MS… you'll still have to purchase it separately unless Asus provides their own link to an ISO.

Many of these system also have custom drivers and software that you won't get automatically with a copy direct from MS. So unless Asus provides an alternate backup method we'll have to do it on our own and hopefully before any problems occur.
http://www.facebook.com/majblackburn Michael Blackburn

Torrents are only as secure as the user that has some idea of how to use md5. Obviously, if you run linux you understand that, but it's probably easier for a large company to just buy some more bandwidth than try to educate its users about hashing. The “seedy” side of the torrent scene would never allow md5 to be built in to the protocol, as it would be too easy to trace back an infected source.
CyberGusa

@ Michael Blackburn – “Google. It's for winners.”

Sorry, nothing new there… that's for if you buy it from MS… you'll still have to purchase it separately unless Asus provides their own link to an ISO.

Many of these system also have custom drivers and software that you won't get automatically with a copy direct from MS. So unless Asus provides an alternate backup method we'll have to do it on our own and hopefully before any problems occur.
Alaskaraoke

The Asus master plan has unfolded. Now when you buy recovery media from them you’ll pay $50 plus shipping. They were already charging the highest in the industry a few months ago at $35. HP only charges $15.
Asus says they’ve stopped providing recovery media with laptops to help the enviornment but it’s really about profit and the bottom line. Mik

Asus to stop shipping recovery discs with netbooks

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