[tossaway1]

The article addresses this:

Of course, if you don’t have a DVD burner (remember, this was a while back — these days you’d use a USB drive), you’d have to get one from a friend who has one, a licensed refurbisher, or your manufacturer (for instance, Dell or Lenovo) for a fee.

[Hamuko]

That is not in any way related to this.

Why did Lundgren buy a genuine Dell recovery disc if the software was available for free online? There would be no need to buy a genuine Dell recovery disc to serve as the master disc for his cloned discs.

Of course, I do know the answer as I am not naïve: the Dell recovery disc is not the same as the Microsoft.com ISO download you can procure. The Dell disc contains an installation of Windows + some Dell extra content that you would expect to have in a Dell disc. And if he was to download the ISO from Microsoft and burn it onto a DVD, it would produce a checksum that wouldn't be identical to the Dell recovery disc, revealing it as a counterfeit.