Zoostorm PC

One of my friends has just bought a new PC through his catalogue. It's based on an Intel E2180 dual core processor and has 2gb ram, 250gb hard drive, 17" LCD monitor and comes with Windows Vista Home Premium pre-installed.

There's no documentation with it beyond the quick set-up guides and there's not even any paperwork relating the the system warranty. It gets better though; the only discs with it are the Foxconn motherboard disc and a copy of Nero Essentials 7. Windows Vista doesn't have a disc with it and would appear to be only available as a recovery partition on the hard drive. I don't know about anybody else but I've always thought providing the OS just as a recovery partition on the hard drive as one of the stupidest innovations ever. I understand that all you actually pay for is the licence as part of the purchase price of the PC but just for a wee bit of penny pinching why not also provide the disc?

I know that if you have a problem with the PC the recovery partition is available without having to hunt for it. But, what happens if there's a catastrophic failure of the hard drive? How would you go about reinstalling Windows if the drive is so badly shagged that even the recovery partition is unusable? Or if the drive is so badly shagged that it needs replacing?

Since, he already has a licence I'm going to hunt around and try and find an untouched copy of Vista to download and burn for him.

Anyway, one of the main reasons he bought the PC was so that he could play Oblivion and he can't. It would appear that the integrated Intel graphics is not powerful enough to run it. But, I've found a little utility called Oldblivion which purports to help get Oblivion running on older unsupported graphics hardware. However, it doesn't support the Shivering Isles expansion. I am going to pop round later, after the football, to try it out for him.