OK, so after a few credit card issues, my lovely parents finally managed to get me my new PC to replace my broken, but well used DELL Dimension. After the disappointment of the inability to change anything hardware wise on the DELL, I decided I’d go for a nice HP Compaq dc5700 with Windows XP Pro (I’ll let everyone else test Vista first!).

All was going well, however my memory won’t go from DELL to HP (no big deal, I’ll get compatible soon!) but the main issue is I didn’t get a recovery CD. This means I’m left with one huge partition and a smaller HP set up recovery partition. WHY I hear you shout! Apparently due to licensing issues from Microsoft – but why shouldn’t I be able to reformat and arrange my operating system as I wish!? Do I need Microsoft’s permission to install a Linux partition? let alone bring some order to my huge hard drive that HP kindly provided with the product!

Don’t get me wrong, the product as a whole seems great, I’m quite happy with it, however I’d prefer to be able to organise the software as I like, rather than have everything on one huge partition and not even the option of adding a linux partition.

And finally, before anyone suggests it, the HP protected recovery partition even stops me using a third party product such as Partition Magic to rearrange my hard disk. Damn them!