[syshum]

Recovery Media has not been shipped with new systems in almost a decade now. At best there is a Recovery partition that consumer can use to create Recovery Disk themselves before the system fails. Obtaining Recovery Media from places like Dell and Lenovo is a Pain in the ass unless you are the original purchaser of the system of an official retailer and you only want 1 Copy of the Media.

The problem is most systems of value sent to a recylers are from off lease buys and corporate refreshes, Most IT shops I know of do not bother getting, storing or collecting Restore disks because we are VL (Volume Licensed) and do not use the OEM image at all even though we pay for it. The first thing that is done on a corp device of any company that has more than 10 or 15 systems is to wipe the entire factory disk and install our own customize version of windows. We also tend to toss any Documentation, CD's and other items that were to come with the system in the trash

So Recylers get thousands of systems annually that are perfectly serviceable, fully licensed with windows but they can not use that license because there is no restore CD and they have no way to obtain one. Thus MS does them a "favor" buy selling them a new license for $25 instead of just providing a way for them to restore the system

[tripletao]

> So Recylers get thousands of systems annually that are perfectly serviceable, fully licensed with windows but they can not use that license because there is no restore CD and they have no way to obtain one. Thus MS does them a "favor" buy selling them a new license for $25 instead of just providing a way for them to restore the system

Then why don't the recyclers just get one restore CD and make copies? They could save almost $25/system....