As I blogged last June, I have a Compaq Presario V6305NR laptop, on which I upgraded the operating system from the pre-installed Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows Vista Ultimate for x64 for testing purposes, using my MSDN subscription. I still need to use it for 64-bit testing once or twice a week, so reverting to the pre-installed system is not an option. I have more use for it at home than at the office, s As I blogged last June, I have a Compaq Presario V6305NR laptop, on which I upgraded the operating system from the pre-installed Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows Vista Ultimate for x64 for testing purposes, using my MSDN subscription. I still need to use it for 64-bit testing once or twice a week, so reverting to the pre-installed system is not an option.I have more use for it at home than at the office, so that’s where it lives most of the time, and as a result I use it for my digital music and photos. The other day I needed to rip a track from an archival CD of my choir to post on the choir’s Web site, but couldn’t: the CD had warped, possibly because of the stick-on label coupled with storage too close to a radiator.I borrowed a copy of the CD from the president of the choir, and took it home to duplicate so that I could replace my damaged copy. To my surprise, I found that Windows Media Player won’t duplicate CDs, even though it will rip and burn them. Being a bit of an audio perfectionist, I didn’t want to put up the quality loss from the two conversions, when a straight copy would be lossless. I tried making an ISO file using ISO Recorder, only to find that ISO Recorder doesn’t support image creation from red book audio discs. Frustrated, I went to my office and used the Roxio software that came with an XP desktop there to make the copy I needed.Then I dug out the box that the V6305NR had come in, and verified that Roxio Creator Basic for Vista was supposed to come with the laptop. I went to the HP support site looking to download a copy, and found only a patch to upgrade to the latest version.I contacted HP support by email, explained the problem, and asked for a download link to the Creator software. Here’s what they said: Once the retail version of operating system is installed on your notebook the recovery partition or preinstalled applications will no longer support the retail version of operating system installed. The only option available is to purchase the Roxio separately or restore the system to factory settings. Needless to say, I’m not happy. Paying $80 for software that I already own really sticks in my craw, and as I explained above I can’t revert to the factory settings.Does anybody have a constructive suggestion for me? Software Development