present tense

Shortly after I opened the package on my new HP TC4400 tablet computer I decided to do the responsible thing and burn some operating system restore disks. Since the tablet doesn’t come with an optical drive I chose to write DVD iso images to a network drive and burn them on another computer. The program which creates the restore disks conveniently offers this as an option.

Unfortunately, on my first try I noticed that I was transferring the images via the wireless network instead of the wired one. It was too slow, so I canceled the operation and restarted it. This time, it began writing CD images (not DVD images), rapidly, over the 100Mbit connection.

I thought I must have skipped the step where I specified DVD images, so I stopped it, again, and restarted it. The program wouldn’t offer me a DVD option this time and would only start burning from CD #2.

I thought that it must be noticing the already created CD#1 on the target drive and was offering to conveniently restart at CD#2 so I deleted all of the images which had been created so far and started again. Big mistake.

Nope, it would only burn CDs and only start from #2. A little bit of Googling on the web produced the information that the program had been written, per an agreement with Microsoft lawyers, to only ever generate one copy of each of the restore CDs. That deleted image of CD#1 was the only one I would ever be allowed to create and it was gone.

This reminded me that every piece of software from Microsoft inevitably puts me in an angry frame of mind. I resolved to forget about having the laptop be dual boot (Linux and Windows) and just use Linux. Life is too short to invite an adversarial lawyer to live in your tools. Especially one from a company as desperate as Microsoft.

Postscript

In a last ditch effort at responsibility (What if I someday wanted to sell the laptop and needed to restore XP?) I tried one last trick to generate the restore images. I booted the laptop from the emergency restore partition and restored it to factory fresh condition. That worked. The system forgot that it had once written CD#1 and would now generate two DVD iso images which I have saved somewhere.

But, in a last act of spite, the program which wrote the two images also informed me that it was now deleting my ability to boot the system from the restore partition since I had the DVD images, and, under the terms of the Microsoft license, I couldn’t be entrusted with both a disk image and a DVD image. Of course, it didn’t offer to free up the wasted space on my hard drive. As far as Microsoft and HP were concerned, they owned that space and they could waste it if they wanted to.

Now, the entire drive holds only Linux partitions so the space has been reclaimed.

I am so glad that Microsoft is on its way down and out.