Ultra laptop and CDs/DVDs

Recently, my sister-in-law bought a new ultra laptop. First thing to notice, just like on Apple recent laptops, there is no CD/DVD player. Fair enough, I mean, we download legally everything nowadays.

But when you need to re-install your laptop, how do you do it? Back in my youth (not that far away!), laptops were shipped with a CD or a DVD to be able to (re)install Windows. You could have lots of reasons to do so: if you wanted to have both Windows and Linux, you changed the hard-drive (in favor of a SSD), etc.

As there is no CD/DVD player anymore, manufacturers stopped to sell laptops with a recovery CD. So how do you choose what to install on your brand new laptop now? What is the cost to ship a bootable USB stick to install Windows, or whatever OS that was on your laptop?

Please, someone, explain this to me!