This weekend, one of our clients was shopping for a new personal computer and contacted us, frustrated about having to pay extra for the Vista recovery disc.

Yes, if you weren’t aware, PC manufacturers no longer provide customers a tangible OS recovery disc. Not surprisingly, Geek Squad wanted to charge her $70.00 to create one for her…lame.

This shows a complete disregard to the fact that you’re often paying over a thousand dollars of your hard earned cash. It’s probably not a big deal until you’re actually reading this post for help. We know it can be a frustrating ordeal when you need the original installation disc to repair your computer and you don’t have the disc.

Today, depending on the PC manufacturer, the set of recovery tools is often included on a separate area (partition) of the hard drive that can be accessed during computer startup (i.e. press F2, F12, etc). However, older machines may not have this feature, or you were instructed to create your own disc, which never happened. Either way, the disc is important because it contains computer repair features that can only be found on the disc.

According to NeoSmart, Microsoft has released a downloadable Vista recovery disc for users that don’t have access to the original. However, due to what we assume are bandwidth issues, NeoSmart only offers a torrent of the download, which may stand as a technical barrier to many in the “Do-It-Yourself” crowd. As a result, for those of you who don’t want to learn about torrents, we’ve decided to help out the community by releasing a mirror of the download.

We’ll keep it up as long as our allotted bandwidth can support it being hosted here. Please say thanks if the download helps you out. Need help burning the recovery disc? Please see our Burn Vista Recovery Disc tutorial for instructions on how to use the free burning software, CDBurnerXP, to successfully burn the disc image (iso).