Laptop manufacturers have been doing that for a while. I've got a Fujitsu Lifebook that I bought about 1½ ago, and it is that way. It has an Emergency Recovery CD which only gives 2 options, reinstall without reformat or reinstall with reformat. I found out the hard way that some programs that were bundled in the CD are picky, such as Microsoft Works for Win95. I ran the setup program, not changing anything, and exited. Upon exit, I got the message "setup is not complete...". When I restarted Works, it refused to find its TaskWizard files, even though they were where they had always been. So, after dealing with this and a few other bugs that weren't easily fixed, I had to reinstall, which I did without reformatting. After I did, I had to reinstall several programs (the file referred to in ALDUS.INI could not be found...) Pagemaker 5.0 being the main one, PrintMaster Gold being another. And, of course, the setup adds all the fluff back, such as Windows/Options/Cabs/Content, 3 megs of crap nobody would ever use...
|