what they'll provide. My old HP Media Center XP had a recovery partition and you could burn recovery disks and a repair disk. My mom's Dell Inspiron ,I Think, had a recovery partition,but no provision for burning recovery disks and they never delivered the OS disk they promised. My Dell XPS 17 allowed me to burn recovery disks and had an OS and Driver disk included in the box. Already mentioned burning a backup to a flash drive on my Gateway netbook.