Yah I'm usually frown against piracy, but I can never understand why Windows OS has to be so damn expensive. Perhaps someone with more knowledge could shed some light on the subject?

Because it's a complex 'program' which takes millions of man-hours to develop.

Comet will be in the poo for SELLING the disks infringing on both the MS TOU AND Copyright.  Their 'Leading counsel' are idiots in it for the fame and/or money.

It's a fair bet that had Comet DEMANDED disks from MS or else they'd cease being a customer [of MS] they would have received LEGITIMATE IP.

And on top of it, it is not REALLY that expensive. Even more given the fact that it is the software most/longest used  on a PC. Windows 7 Home Premium OEM is 79,90 EUR here on Amazon, I don't call that 'damn' expensive.

Price of the OS is directly related to the amount of piracy in your country,the higher the piracy rate the cheaper it will be for the real product,or did you guys not get that memo   ,no surprise i guess ms wouldn't want too many people to know,i couldn't find the article i'm referring to,however i did come across the one for vista in china,ms dropped it's price by over 60%,yeah quite frankly i have no sympathy for ms when comet provide a service that was in demand,especially in my situation where the one time make only one set of recovery discs failed to work,on a stink'n hp machine,the disks which once upon a time could also be downloaded as floppy Images were removed from hp's website,i had two choices,pay i think it was $250nz for a new set or buy another comp for basicly the same price & make another set,no btainer ain't it i bought another comp & created the recovery set,it works well on both comps,obviously the comp i bought was the same model as the previous tho a year later,so middle finger to me from me in support of comet 

EDIT:OK I give up where is the thing to get email alerts when replying to threads

edit 2: god dam it! i've caught zubaz's bug, wtf is a btainer,ok according to wiki it's a zubasim for brainer    hehehe 

As my niece was rightly advised by MS, it is the responsibility of the OEM manufacturers to provide recovery media, and the fact that the OEM's are placing this on a recovery partition on the HDD to save costs is not an issue for Microsoft, according the the customer relations person she spoke with.  Apparently, he told my niece that once Dell, Toshiba, Sony, whoever, have paid for their bulk licenses, it it wholly up to them as to how they deliver the software, which is why they are able to avoid including recovery discs while bundling oodles of crapware with the installation.

Frankly, I think Microsoft should take a tougher stand for the OEMs to provide cleaner installations AND recovery discs, but I don't think it has the balls to disenchant and/or alienate its major partners, such as Hewlett Packard, etc.  Comet may have overstepped the mark, but to be fair, it was trying to look after its customers, whereas MS and the OEM's aren't.

Oh, and as for the idea that one can contact the OEMs to purchase a recovery disc is bullshit.  After spending several hundred dollars on a PC WITH an OS, the last thing one wants to do is spend upwards of $70 for a frigging 10c disc containing software one has ALREADY paid for.

I wonder how many PC manufacturers are going to have to rethink thier policies.

I recently bought a new laptop and HP sells a restore disk seperately for it.

By this, HP is pirating the OS by selling it seperately.

Best.  Advice.  Ever.  +1  

Sorry - double post...

I've been using Auslogics Registry Cleaner for years now. Is Wise any better?

Thanks, G_Bison...saved me digging it up...

As much as I like DrJBHL and tweaking my PC :  'Defragging' the registry or even 'better' the RAM is the most useless tuning-tip ever proclaimed by the makers of tuning tools.