In the following, all terms in quotes are my own terminology, which may not necessarily align with Dell's, Microsoft's, or anyone else's.
On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 6:16 PM, Jon Harris <[email protected]> wrote: > 1. Dell from my experience has been getting better about the shovel ware on > their reinstall disks. They are usually on separate set of disks as is a > lot of their custom drivers. In my experience: Dell has long done a good job keeping "OS install" vs "drivers" vs "apps" discs separated, at least for the business lines (Optiplex, Latitude, Precision), with the "OS install" generally being fairly close to the vanilla OS configuration one would get from Microsoft. Dell generally just adds a little support info, and any drivers needed to do the OS install. Sometimes (and with increasing frequency (very common now)), there's an extra charge to get such media (typically a few bucks) when you order the PC. I'm OK with this; we don't need 73 copies of the same OS disc at work. Now, sometimes Dell doesn't include an "OS install" disc. Either the PC didn't ship with any media, or the media is a just a "system restore" set. When the PC doesn't ship with any media, you have the option of creating a "system restore" set yourself (from the "system restore" image on the hard drive). The "system restore" returns the system to factory configuration, complete with any shovelware Dell might have originally loaded. (This seems to be more common for the home product lines (Dimension, Inspiron)). In the case where all you have is "system restore", I've found Dell to be willing to sell you a plain "OS install" disc for a small fee (~$20, IIRC), even for the home products. (As an aside: I once diff'ed a Dell Win XP "OS install" disc vs a Gateway Win XP "OS install" disc, and the only difference was four smallish OEMBIOS.* files, and the fact that Dell added the Intel "iaStor" SATA AHCI driver. The remaining 600+ MiB was identical, down to the last byte. So clearly sometimes the OEM media is barely touched by the OEM.) > One of the reasons I prefer to get my garage clients to purchase Dell > over other brands. Most of the others from what I have seen like to > really dump everything on one disk which is just full of garbage. Indeed. HP seems to be the worst for this, at least on their home PCs. And they would *not* sell me a plain OS install disc. I could get the "system restore" (with all shovelware) or nothing. > 2. From what a Microsoft store person told me according to them, well > depending on who you talk to, media is media for Windows 8. I realize this is just what you were told, but I've just today found that to be wrong, assuming one really means *all* media. This laptop is licensed for Win 8 Home. I have some Win 8 Pro Volume License Media, and that installed Pro. However, the Win 8 OEM Dell media, which was marked "Pro", installed Win 8 Home on this laptop. So what you were told appears true for *some* media. FYI/FWIW. -- Ben
