[Dystopian]

> Microsoft's media creation tool is dead simple, you run it and tell it where to create the media.

As long as you have a computer. Best answer for this is households who only have 1 functioning computer. Usually low-income households.

One of my first jobs was working at a computer repair store. Customer would come in looking for a reformat and we'd give them a few options.

- We'll restore (pay an hour or so of our time).

- Buy a new licence (since we didn't stock restore disks and weren't going to spend time making them).

- Buy a new computer - with the advent of dirt cheap computers a lot of the time this was a viable solution.

These disks definitely fill a hole of having something you could give to clients and they could do the DIY route.

[cptskippy]

That's all true And he was not licensed to distribute Microsoft Software.

[e12e]

Interesting that this makes it illegal to download install media for a friend. So if someone locks themselves out of bitlocker, or the drive fails - they'd need to boot into a free operating system (say a live Linux distros that they could legally get from a friend) - and then download and make an install stick for Windows.

Because someone else lending them a ready-made windows USB key (from the free download ms offers) would be illegal distribution of copyrighted material.

So much for right to help with repair/fair use etc.