Re: Do you feel degraded by Microsoft's downgrade program?

You didn't explicitly say, but I'm guessing the recovery partition was
Vista. That would make sense since Vista is what came standard on the
machine.

"They offered to sell me the Vista Recovery CD's for $45 even though they
agreed that I was entitled to Vista, but not the media!"

That would be a Lenovo thing, although I'm sure many other OEMs do the
same. IIRC Dell still provides recovery discs with their Latitude machine.
IDK about the Inspirons. Forcing you to provide for your own recovery is
just another way that some vendors are choosing to cheapen their offerings.

FYI for Vista they are DVDs, not CDs.

"Now the topper - even though I'm using XP, M$ will count my laptop as a
Vista install (so be aware that they inflate their numbers when it comes to
the number of new Vista sales - since they don't keep track of those who
downgrade to XP)."

What do you expect? You bought a machine with a Vista license so of course
it counts as a Vista sale. I'm surprised they don't _also_ count an XP
sale, though. :)