Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

Jeneane Sessum, also picking up on the New York Times article about disposable computers, notes a key problem with fixing your broken machine - the lack of Windows install disks:

I spent $2,000 on computers last year--my Acer laptop from buy.com (do NOT buy.com) and an HP PC from Microcenter here in Atlanta. The year before we bought a PC from a different store (or OEM as Scoble refers to them). In fact, I've been buying PCs for years, and it's been a long, long time since I got the actual software that would let me re-install, from scratch, the Microsoft OS. Maybe never.

Yes, Robert, the world is round and every day all around this round world, people pay for Microsoft's OS twice. Once on the computer and once in the box.

Grrr, I hate that too. I can't imagine not being able to pave my machine.

I'll get you a copy, if your OEM won't. On the machines I've bought lately the install bits are on the hard drive. Just gotta know where to look for them. Have you called tech support yet?

This seems a bit silly though. Why should I have to go through all of this, just to save Microsoft the cost for a CD - probably under a buck. Why should I have to go looking for bits of Windows? And if my hard drive is trashed, where am I to go? If I want a copy of Windows XP, I can expect to pay about $250 (at Amazon) And if I call technical support, I can probably expect to spend at least an hour on the phone.

Isn't it simpler to just throw the whole thing in the trash and pop by the store to pick up a new machine? At around $400, it's a lot less than the cost in time and energy that I would have spent otherwise.

I've always assume that the $33 billion that Microsoft has in the bank is the savings from never actually providing a CD to customers, or the profit from selling customers that CD that they never got when they paid for the operating system the first time. And I'll bet that Microsoft technical support would be half the size if customers didn't have to keep calling back to authorize the operating system they've already paid for - twice.