How much does recovery media cost?

I am looking at purchasing a NV53 series laptop but it appears Gateway does not provide a reinstall DVD or recovery software on the laptop.

It looks like you purchase recovery media from Gateway but without a serial number I can't go through with the process.

I find it odd that some manufacturers don't prove a means to reinstall the OS, since you paid for it in the price of the computer.

Thanks for any insight you can provide.

Greg

 

You could call and ask? There may be a recovery partition on the hard drive if not over written...and you have several options to do a clean install depending on how handy you are with software installation.

 

When I got my P-6860FX in 2008, recovery media I think was like $20 including shipping, or something stupid like that. Wasn't very much...
But yeah - ya gotta provide a system serial number.

 

If the sticker is missing, the serial number can be read with several utilities like Everest.

DMI System Serial Number 101XXXXXXXXXXX7DKS00

 

You can get the model and serial number via a simple vbscript. Open a text editor, paste this in, and save it as serial.vbs

Code:

Dim objWMI : Set objWMI = GetObject("winmgmts:")
Dim colSettingsComp : Set colSettings = objWMI.ExecQuery("Select * from Win32_ComputerSystem")
Dim colSettingsBios : Set colSettingsBios = objWMI.ExecQuery("Select * from Win32_BIOS")
Dim objComputer, strModel, strSerial,

For Each objComputer in colSettings
	strModel = RTrim(objComputer.Model)
	wscript.echo strModel
Next

For Each objComputer in colSettingsBios
	strSerial = objComputer.SerialNumber
	wscript.echo strSerial
Next

The problem with the P-series laptops is that Gateway did not set the serial number on many of the motherboards - a lot of the times, the serial shows up as "INVALID". If this happens, and the serial number sticker is missing, you will have to ask someone else for theirs. You can still order the discs here, you just need a valid serial that has already been registered with Gateway.

 

Now I understand more about it, Thanks for your sharing! It's good for reference.