OMG! Computers don't come with WHAT anymore? O__O

Ok, here's the deal...

I purchased a new laptop last night. It's a Toshiba Satellite L300 Series, and I'm already very pleased with its performance and capabilities. Standing in the store with the salesman last night, I was shocked to find out that computers are no longer sold with recovery disks. What the heck? Since when? I was told that for somewhere between an extra $60 and $100, plus 2-4 hours, I could have some made for my machine. I declined politely, of course, seeing as I was on a budget of $500. I guess I just don't get it. XD

My dad bought me my desktop PC from this same store in 2005, and it still has its recovery disks. I bought the laptop to take some of the pressure off of my poor tower. >_< The poor thing is dieing a slow and painful death.

Here's my question... how in the world do I make my own recovery disk(s)? Is there a way?

Yes it is sad these days that there are not coming recovery disks (cd's / dvd's) anymore with computers, or a a loose operating system, and drivers of the system, so that you can re-install it manually, without the need to go to a computer store / expert to let them do it for you.

I know well that there are on some brands, a reserved partition on the hard disk, which contains the recovery part. This partition is hidden from the user self, so that you can't mess with it.

Self i bought a couple of weeks ago, also a laptop (Acer Aspire 7530G), and there are also no recovery disks or any other disks with drivers. In the store they told me about it, and that before i am going to use it, to make the recovery disks self. The program that came with the Acer is called NTI Backup now 5.

I got a message in the system tray saying to make a backup of the factory settings, i clicked on it and followed the instructions. It also told me that it will cost 12 cd's or 2 dvd's. I used the last one and am happy with it, to have those. As i used them all twice. The making of it, took a hour, but running the recovery self took an few hours.

NTI backup now 5 trail version.

But self i think is that there is also some software installed on the laptop, that says that you need to make a recovery disk now, of the factory settings. This was my case. If not you can use the url above.


On my work i have done re-installations on laptops and desktops, with a cd for win xp (dvd for vista) and then i had to find on the net for drivers of controllers, chipsets and other things that is needed to let everything work and communicate good. (Sometimes finding the right driver can be a pain, if you don't know where to look).

I hope you can get a recovery disks for your laptop.