Good - I was fearing that you were slowly turning into PB :|

Same laptop I have, you'll want to do some partition fiddling with it as it comes with 90Gb useable out of the box they've put so much recovery shite on there!

Someone has to fill in for him.  I'm trying, but I need help!

I think it's extremely thoughtful of laptop manufacturers to make sure that you can easily restore all the CuntingFuckware™ they supplied, and I would gladly see at least 50% of the advertised capacity of the barely-large-enough SSD dedicated to such a restore volume. Saves you having to write down a list of all the CuntingFuckware™ so you can download and re-install it after a repave of your PC (and that's assuming the right version of CORELshop Pro Elements Lite 2011 OEM is even available for download anymore).

Helpfully the software wasn't all that crap, and they offer a software manager which you can download to put things like the hotkey functions back on anyway, so if you have an internet connection there's no need to have a 30gb restore image on a 128gb SSD. Whatever happened to the days they just supplied a DVD with the machine!

In fact why don't they just supply a 32Gb "restore" USB key in this day and age?

I was going to say because they've removed optical drives from a lot of laptops. But the 32GB USB drive is what should happen these days.

My MBA came with the OS and iLife on a USB stick.

Apple are doing it correctly then!

Was it worth the extra thou?

I don't think it was that much more TBH, but I can't remember how much it cost back in 2010 (yes, even then OS restore was being shipped on USB).

I mainly bought it for weight, OS X, and "ooooh shiney". And it's not disappointed on any front.

Apple don't do that any more, since Lion (where you could buy a USB restore stick) they have made a recovery partition on your HDD. With mountain lion they no longer offer a USB stick at all. The expectation is you'll just download it from the apple store in the event of disaster recovery.

I assume Macs can fuck up enough to not have internet access?

Well that just sucks.

I think they have some sort of GUI recovery mode thing that can connect to the internet, which implies that if a Mac can't access the net (assuming a connection is available), something is really badly wrong.

I think.

I should probably find this stuff out, in case my MBP gets ill.

I think they have some sort of GUI recovery mode thing that can connect to the internet, which implies that if a Mac can't access the net (assuming a connection is available), something is really badly wrong.

I think.

I should probably find this stuff out, in case my MBP gets ill.

Hey double post, awesome.

Hey double post, awesome.

That's the Apple backup kicking in. It's like having two computers, for the price of three.

But they just work so you never have to do that, and as Caer says they have a GUI option which connects to the web without an OS installed.