Yesterday we bought a Fry’s special eMachines computer – it came with Windows Vista Home Premium (and the hardware was sufficient to run Linux KVM). Nice! Like most machines shipped with Microsoft products there was no CD/DVD included for a re-install.
Contacting the support for eMachines via web-chat they emailed links to instructions for creating recovery tools. Well, that email never arrived and the CSR terminated the web-chat before confirming we had received the instructions (fail!). Too bad.
Their lame chat program didn’t send a transcription and also did not allow us to copy/paste what was typed.
Still don’t have a EULA compliant recovery CD/DVD but was able to get a copy of Windows Vista from BitTorrent (faster than it took the web-chat to fail to answer questions).
Customer service is poor, no Windows DVD included, no instructions directly on the machine, etc. When it’s hard to do the right thing, and so easy to get a pirated copy, it almost seems like eMachines (and other Vendors) are encouraging software piracy.