Welcome to capitalism.

You bought and paid for a laptop with XP Pro, all that 'vaporware' which 
came pre-installed on it is what paid Toshiba to sell you the laptop with XP 
Pro.  The 'Recovery CD' will either return your laptop to the 'Out-of-box' 
state, or allow you to re-install chosen vaporware.

There are two ways to do what you want.  I've done it more times than I care 
to remember.

Plan A:  Buy your own bona fide copy of XP Pro and install from scratch, 
downloading necessary drivers from Toshiba
Plan B:  Uninstall all the garbage they've ungraciously preinstalled.

Of course purchasing your own copy of XP Pro will set you back $100 - $150, 
but it will give you a cleaner machine.  My plan of action has always been 
to remove all the garbage they put on there, leaving me with a tattered, but 
usable cleaner OS.  I dump it all.  Make a big pot of coffee, because you'll 
be at if for hours and will soon tire of restarting your 'New' computer.  I 
use Symantec's Norton WinDoctor to clean up the mess all this crap makes. 
WinDoctor ain't free, you can run CCleaner (Crap Cleaner) to do housekeeping 
from what AOL, Quicken, yadda, yaddah, yadda leaves behind.

Toshiba, Dell, HP, Compaq, etc should be shot for turning out these machines 
burdened with all this avoirdupois.  I remember the old days when I bought a 
computer and it came with a box of instructions, diskettes containing the OS 
and virgin harddrive, oh how I long for it once again.

"Rob Nicholson" <rob.nicholson@nospam_informed-direct.com> wrote in message 
news:S6CdnT6gOMCfs-LZRVnytw@bt.com...
> We've just taken delivery of a Toshiba Portege R200 as a way of evaluating 
> Toshiba laptops esp. the small form factor. We've bought Dell Latitude X1 
> in the past but these don't (bizarrely) come with PCMCIA slots so we can't 
> use Vodafone 3G/GPRS cards.
>
> Anyway, that's not the point. As seems to be the case with modern 
> manufacturers, the laptop is loaded up with all sorts of crap (sorry 
> useful utilities) which we definitely don't want!! So we want to 
> re-install plain vanilla Windows XP Pro and take it from there - we have 
> our own build configuration.
>
> Apart from the laptop not coming with a CD/DVD drive (one up for Dell for 
> similar price), it's only come with a "Recovery CD". What does this 
> recovery CD contain? Is it a Windows XP Pro install CD or an image of the 
> laptop with all the useful stuff already installed. If the later, how does 
> one go about getting a CD-ROM for re-installation? I assume it's a OEM 
> Windows XP Pro license on there.
>
> Thanks, Rob.
>