I have had a pretty hard time keeping my laptop functioning. After a hard drive failure, the recovery Vista discs Gateway sent me would no longer work. Unfortunately, they aren’t actually install discs – they just read a repair partition on the original hard drive.
Gateway was not at all interested in providing me with legitimate replacement discs. All I got out of them after hours of pleading for a means to run a legitimate Vista install on my laptop (which I STILL have a license for) was another set of faux-replacement discs and a $20 handling charge.