HP Recovery Manager works like a dream

My woes with the Microsoft Vista and AOL AIM 6.5 bug came to some finality on Friday. Even after uninstalling AIM 6.5, which gave me back network access, the Windows WMI service wouldn't run and every audio program fell on deaf ears (not mine, the computer's.) A commentor suggested I turn UAC back on and reinstall AIM which I strong considered doing, but since everything on the system was so wacky I thought there might be downstream effects to doing that. (I do appreciate the suggestion though.)

There was no new news on the TechNet forums, other than more people experiencing the same problem, so I decided to reinstall Vista and start all over again to make sure I fully recovered from this crippling AIM bug.

I'm on my second laptop from HP. This after years of using Dell and IBM laptops, I've really come to greatly prefer the HP Pavillion laptops for business use. But one thing that's always bothered me is that HP laptops don't ship with the stock Windows installation disks. The laptop has a recovery partition on the main hard drive (about 7GB in size) and a restore CD that will put your laptop back to the factory configuration (both the main OS boot, and recovery partitions). This always bothered me, as most of us know that restoring from backups often has its own set of issues, including just plain old not working. I've always reinstalled from either the stock Windows CD disks and applied all the drivers and updates, or from a Ghost image.

So I decided to give the HP recovery partition a try, rather than install Vista using my Microsoft Partner Action Pack software licenses. After backing up all my files, pictures, music, email data and preferences, I used the HP Recovery Manager to start the laptop and reinstall the main OS boot partiton, using the software on the recovery partition.

To my great surprise, it worked - and it worked flawlessly. My laptop was back to the exact condition (hard disk wise) as when it arrive out of the box from HP months ago. All the drivers loaded properly, Vista behaved well, and it all happened in about 1/4th the time as compared to loading from the Vista CD disks. The lengthy part was applying all of the Vista and Microsoft Office software updates, and then reloading all the other software apps and tools I use.

Number one, I've very happy with this experience using the HP Recovery Manager. And two, I am much less anxious about not having orginal Vista installation CDs come with my laptop. I'm sure thankful now that I didn't delete that recovery partition when I wanted to get back those 7GBs so many times earlier.

HP. My hats off to you for a very satistfactory customer experience recovering my laptop.

• Software
• HP Pavillion Notebook
• Recovery Manager
• Windows Vista