I don't know if things have changed, but my daughter and son-in-law have
HP computers and you could make 1 restore disk on a dvd.

I'll check into it. One of the other things that is lacking
in the current offerings is documentation. They put everything on the
hard drive, so I'll have to wade through what is on there.

I am sure they figure most would be upset with a 64 bit system and no 64 bit
OS.

> No IDE controller, contrary to what the salesman said.

Salesmen want to sell, another Buyer Beware.

> In the meantime I noticed that with just the desktop, and the avast virus
> checker loaded, the machine was using 1.2 gig of memory! Wow! XP used to
> run a little over 500 meg at the same point. No wonder machines are coming
> with 4 gig of memory.

Extra loaded junk software to add to the bloat, and most will be 'trial' stuff
that you will never get completely removed. With a default OS install only it
would likely half the mem useage, same as Xpee.
>
> Also noticed that the machine did not come with an install or recovery
> disk. (HP will gladly sell me a recovery disk from the web site.) There
> is a recovery image on the hard drive in a separate partition, but I wonder
> how secure that is against prying viruses, worms, and trojans should any
> slip past the virus checker.

Ahh, the first thing to do is create that recovery disk, before connecting to
the internet, and backup the hidden partition, next would be to shrink the MS
partition down to minimum and get your Linux installed.

I bought a Dell, same deal, I backed up, squashed, installed Linux.

> So, as soon as I get a secure back-up, or the ide drives up, it is back to
> Linux. Why not now? An article in Maximum PC talks about some vendors
> wanting the user to re-install the original OS before they will help with
> warranty issues. (Though I imagine if the computer is completely dead,
> there won't be an issue because they won't be able to tell what is loaded.)

Only if the HD dies, if not they can look at the drive and may give you grief.

> In the meantime I'll just have to settle for live disks till I'm ready to
> go.
> The machine is also loaded with multimedia stuff,

There is the memory bloat!

Good luck with your new computer. I just got a new HP with a Turlon
64 X2 dual-core processor. Even though it had a 64-bit processor, it
came with a 32-bit Vista Home Premium OS. My wife's new Gateway is
the same way. I made a backup disk set before dual-booting Ubuntu.

I tried loading the 64-bit version of 7.10, but it would not load, so
I fell back on the 32-bit version of Hardy. I have not encountered
any of the video and audio problems that other HP users have had with
Hardy, but the Broadcom WiFi chipset in the HP has me stumped. None
of the fixes have worked.

If you have a spare wireless router some of them can be reverted to an AP,
then you can flip it to be a reverse AP. Once setup you can unplug a regular
ethernet cable and plug into the router and it knows no differance, no
wireless stuff to deal with. I do it here with a Buffalo WHR-G54S, but before
that I used an older Linksys B AP.

Many wireless chipsets can use a little help from ndiswrapper.

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/joomla/

Ndiswrapper is in the Ubuntu repositories and on the Ubuntu CD.