Lenovo 3000 N100 Questions - Recovery Media

I recently obtained a new Lenovo 3000 N100 laptop w/ Vista Premium installed. One of the first things I did after booting it up was to create the System Recovery Media. This created 7 CDs, which I stored in a safe location. After creating these disks, the option was grayed out. After I finished configuring the laptop software and settings and installing additional software, I performed a backup using the Rescue and Recovery software. This made a 7GB "BASE" image on the hard drive. I then used the "copy to external media" feature to burn a set of 3 Rescue and Recovery DVDs.

After creating all of this media, I then realized that there were a few updates for the Rescue and Recovery software (I hadn't discovered the Lenovo update software yet) - so I proceeded to update it to patch version 4.1 and then upgrade to version 4.2. During this process, I was prompted to dispose of my old recovery media and create new ones. I can see that the System Recovery media setting is no longer grayed out since upgrading the Rescue and Recovery software to version 4.2. This is a little confusing, because there is no option to create the System Recovery discs from within Rescue and Recovery - it uses a separate program.

QUESTIONS:

Do I need to dispose of both my old System Recovery media AND the Rescue and Recovery media and create all new discs? This seems quite burdensome and annoying. My understanding is that the System Restore media will bring the laptop back to it's factory state, while the Rescue and Recovery media will bring it back to the last state where I created the disks. Is this correct?

Perhaps I don't understand the differences between the two sets of media. If this is the case, someone please help me out here. Either way, I'd like to know if I need to trash the 10 discs that I have already created.


thanks in advance.

- Jason

 

can anyone help here?