I can attest to this after trying to recover a broken Vaio using the manually burnt restore CDs (all seven of them), and then seeing a new Thinkpad ship without any system CDs… This is just no way to handle customer service. Beyond Microsoft’s being so anal about password protecting their “Genuine Software”, thus preventing you from legally just borrowing the CD from someone else, PC makers make you jump through hoops even to obtain your own legal copy of Windows.