Utility patitions are overrated. That's just another way companies pinch pennies to pad the bottom line. They place a recoery partition on the hard drive in place of an actual cd. It saves them the cost of cd media and man hours for workers to make them. Doesn't seem like much but multiply it by thousands of machines and the overall price adds up.

The problem comes in when hard drive has a physical failure. When this happens all partitons are lost which includes the utility partition.

When I refresh a machine from scratch I like to do "zero fill" on the hard drive. This process writes zeroes to the entire drive with verification. This makes the drive nearly factory fresh. Machines seem to run better when a "zero fill" is done prior to Operating System install.


Quote Originally Posted by meuandthelot View Post
You said what I meant better than I, I meant tied to the original system & specs &/or mother board in some way and "Bios locked" came to mind.



Agreed 110%, they have the HD partitioned with a copy of the OS in there, the original recovery cd is very basic. Why I didn't question a true XP cd or the 6CD bundle they want to sell me now at P.O.S/P??

I wasn't really looking that deeply as this was an entry level system, and it came with about a 25 cd bundle(mainly bloatware/spyware I find now.

Anyway, this says it all.....

In my opinion OEM machines are a large hassle. They really are when you realize just what's available AND your machine doesn't need to run 49 processes to operate ;)

Thanks again,
Rich