Asus laptop recovery disc question

[Osem]

Just bought Osem Jnr one of these to assist with his A level studies etc.

Asus K53E 4GB 500GB 15.6 Inch Laptop

http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Produc...er/5086737.htm

Although not the speediest processor, we're very pleased with it so far and it feels like a quality bit of kit but it didn't come with any software discs.

When we'd finished the initial W7 set up we were asked to create a recovery disc and I was surpised how long this process took. On clicking the create recovery disk OK button, it took c. 60 mins of 'setting up' activity via the HDD before the actual disc burning process commenced which then took about anlother 30-40 mins. It required 5 DVDs to be burned in total.

All of this seems rather a lot - when I created a recovery disc for my Toshiba laptop, it was done in minutes and only required 1 disc so why's the ASUS different and what's on all those discs? I'm cautious about trying to open any of them because I don't have a clue if doing that might cause problems.

Cheers as always.

[thenry]

bloatware crap, pathetic and a waste. id advise you to return it and find something better, even Dell outlets are worth a punt if you dont want to spend much. argos.. puke.

cos of all this bloatware crap id advise two things with any machine. 1st download a matching OS that matches your sticker key and burn it onto a disc.. one with the latest service pack intergrated is a massive bonus. fresh install, activate your sticker key then 2nd download and install drivers. theres a few software/drivers from the machines manufacturer youll want.. all the other hardware drivers can be done from again the machines manufactueres support site, windows update, hardwares manufacturers site or 3rd party software. i wouldnt advise the latter.

after that youll have a machine running smoothly without the crap.

[Osem]

Thanks for the feedback. It's a bit late to do anything about the machine now but he loaded Office onto it earlier and seems happy enough with how it's peforming so far.

As for me, well I know very little about the workings of these things so wouldn't want to start mucking about with things I don't understand. Just wondered why all the discs? Guess it's copied everything that was on the HDD but it seems a hell of a lot more than my Toshiba did despite seemingly having roughly the same software on it i.e. Win7 Home Premium and Office 2010 Starter.

[thenry]

what size were the disc?

google...

bloatware
Noun: Software whose usefulness is reduced because of the excessive disk-space and memory it requires.

and your configuration is probably on it too.. may be..

did you see preinstalled software when it loaded up a user account

[Osem]

Normal 4.7gb DVDs.

The only major non Asus software on it is Win7 Home Premium and MS Office 2010 Starter and Trend AV which I'll delete.

[v0id]

The recovery disk you made will do the exact same job as the recovery partition, a factory reset.ie, back to how you bought it

There's nothing stopping you making another recovery disk after you've 'decrapified' though

[thenry]

must of burnt using a crap method. surprising that from asus but then again manufacturer recovery suck all together. so there was a lot of asus stuff, shocking. each one of those discs is part of what your first log on/boot was. only way to narrow down is complaining to asus, they might send you out a single recovery disc

[Dai]

Personally I'd forget about the manufacturers recovery system. What I do with a new machine is remove all the trial and unwanted software, add the core stuff you want (such as Office in your case) and once it's set up in running condition I use Acronis True Image to make a full copy of the disk to a backup drive.

If the need arises you can boot from the Acronis cd and restore the whole disk in 15 minutes. Alternatively you can renew the image every so often to create backups of your added personal files so it can be easily rolled back without major file losses.

[nffc]

The cd drive in this laptop is slow so that's probably why it took so long. Asus don't tend to preload with crap.

[thenry]

why the 5 discs? dodgy burning method?

[Osem]

Thanks for the replies guys. To be fair, the burning of the discs didn't take the majority of the time. It was over an hour of HDD activity, on screen progress bars and various things being 'loaded up' before the burning sequence started and I was asked to insert the first disc. I have no idea if anything (e.g. updates) was being downloaded during this period but if it was I guess that would've slowed things down.

Just to clairfy I don't have a particular problem with this, I was just curious as to why it took so long and why it required 5 DVDs when my Toshiba only required one. It seems the Asus has stored a hell of a lot more stuff on those discs than the Tosh did.

Just found this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1cK36XUNi8

Which shows the process I went through using AI Recovery Burner, except that the initial, pre-burning stage of process took a lot longer and only 4 discs were required.

I reckon the whole thing was being slowed down because initial updates being downloaded at the same time.

[thenry]

dont connect to the net next time your loading up a fresh install. connect after all is done and your logged onto a user account.

Please do not advise to do a re install just because of the bloat just uninstall it and stop it running its not hard and takes just a few minutes.

If you are running windows 7 after you cleared the bloat just use its own back up and recovery centre to create a system backup you do not need anything else. It will burn to dvd or create an image file and allows you to create an emergency recovery cd although all windows install discs of 7 have it anyway

[thenry]

why not? whats so wrong about a fresh install apart from having to download and install certain drivers/software/utilities from the manufacturers site. An installer with the latest updates/service pack integrated is a major plus.

BTW....it's not Bloatware - it's called Crapware....there is a difference.

Bloatware is where software increases in size - like Windows to add new features.

Crapware is software loaded by the OEM that you may not want.

---------- Post added at 19:16 ---------- Previous post was at 19:13 ----------

Originally Posted by tizmeinnit

Please do not advise to do a re install just because of the bloat just uninstall it and stop it running its not hard and takes just a few minutes.

And how do you know that that removes all the dll's, reg entries and other crap. You don't. The best way is a virgin install.