or an even better scenario for ya. My mother in law has a hp with onboard restore. Her computer started running really horribly so i went and checked it out. She was MAJORLY infected with both virii and trojans. and the real kicker was after carefull examination (i looked at the screen ) not only was her primary partiton infected but so was the poartition with system restore information. Now i know there are a bunh of you out there that are going to miss the point of this by thinking "well she should have been scanning her downloads" and all that other crap. The point is that if you have a really bad infection or some such problem what are you supposed to do if you have to format but your recover data has been compromised. Personaly id rather pay the extra money and have the stuff i need to recover ona cd