"I had to pay HP for system recovery CDs because I wanted to reload everything when my computer was malfunctioning," one reader wrote. "My computer is over four years old, so of course it is no longer under warranty. I could not get the computer to recognize the recovery CDs that HP sent me, so I had to call the HP tech number again. Now HP wants to charge me $45 to tell me how to make the recovery CDs they sent me work. They said this happens a lot with these CDs."

A reader whose HP Pavilion dv4000 was only a few months old had a similar experience recently when an error message told him a Windows file was missing or corrupt. "I did exactly what it said and finally got into the recovery console, which only had a C: prompt and a message saying to type 'exit' to quit," the reader wrote. "They do not show any instructions on how to work in the recovery console -- if we are not given any documentation on how to use the recovery console, how am I supposed to recover it? I called HP Support and they said that this is a very complicated case and our 'senior support experts' can help you. The guy was literally selling the expertise of the technical support expert; and said I can buy 30 minutes for a charge of $60 and the resolution is not guaranteed. I asked him to just tell me how to fix the XP installation, but he said I would risk losing data if I tried to do it myself without their experts walking me through it."

The dv4000 customer decided to buy the 30 minutes of support time and was put in touch with the HP 'expert' rep. "The guy told me to do the same things which I'd done by rebooting from the setup CD, trying to access the setup windows, etc.," the reader wrote. "Finally he asked me to type chkdsk/r in the recovery console and said this would bring my computer back, which worked. What I don t understand is why they had to play this drama just to issue a DOS command. In the absence of a recovery CD, they should put the instructions either in a document or the recovery console should provide the instructions. I am pretty sure there may be a lot of customers paying HP for such support activities even though the product is within the warranty period. I believe they are knowingly profiting from a problem in their recovery process and are applying scare tactics to rip off the customers."

Some customers even find out on day one of their HP experience that the disk-based recovery partition may not work when needed. "How about when you need the recovery disk fresh out of the box?" wrote one reader. "I just opened up (a new PC) and need the disk to get it started. I was told by tech support that I could take it back to the store where I purchased it or give them $25 for the recovery CD. What a deal."

But the best deal might be avoiding PCs without recovery CDs altogether. "I recently went through this 'lack of recovery CD-ROM' that so many others have experienced," another reader wrote. "The computer manufacturers lying in bed with Microsoft thought, 'what a great idea, store the install software on a hard drive partition! We can save $1 for every computer we sell!' Yeah, that's great until the customer's hard drive crashes and s/he has NO WAY to recover the system. I say, stop buying these computers that do not come with the original install software on external media. If you do not look into this ahead of time you will eventually pay for it in the long run. Usually with either NO or expensive support. This policy is essentially a consumer scam. Stay away from these systems!"