Some of you may have heard me rant about "crapware" that comes on new PCs or bundled with software like printer or webcam drivers. Well it isn’t just me. Cnet’s News.com recently had an interesting article on this topic which can be found here. I thought it was interesting in a couple of ways. One is that it is very true. Last year I had the "dis"pleasure of setting up two brand spanking new PCs (a Toshiba laptop and an Emachines desktop). Both were so full of unwanted software that their performance was dismal. And unlike the Cnet article states about Dell, both these companies would not sell me a Windows XP CD to do a clean install. They did come with restore Cd’s or a restore utility built in, but that included all of the unwanted software. To make matters worse, they both had AOL software installed that would not properly uninstall. I went through the tech support channels for both companies with little success, which I don’t blame the support staff since it isn’t their software. But they did put it on the computer I paid for and they should have check out the software before renting out my computer.
I also found it interesting that there were quite a few comments that it isn’t a big deal and that people should just expect to format and reinstall. That’s somewhat understandable on a site where most of the readers are tech savvy but it isn’t acceptable for the general user although that is really what it has come to. But that is really a shame, because your average home user doesn’t feel comfortable doing that and doesn’t have the expertise required if they have trouble with device drivers, which is usually the case with a laptop. Emachines actually had a cool restore utility built into the BIOS and a hidden partition on the hard drive so that an average home user could actually restore their PC with little trouble, but then they made it uncool by having all that same unwanted software in there image.
Another interesting twist was that there were some references to Macs and a trackback to a Mac blog which had linked to the article and was discussing it. Now I don’t have anything against Macs in principle, but I do feel that the average home user, like most of my relatives who I help, are better off with a Windows XP PC. For example, my sister ended up getting the Emachines PC including monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers for $150 as an a day after Thanksgiving sale special. After cleaning it up, it had quite speedy performance and is going to do anything they will want to do and more. And there is plenty of free software for Windows for anything from anti-virus to an office suite. If you could get a Mac for anything near that price let me know and I’d consider it.
So if you are in the market for a new PC, expect to put some initial effort into getting it set up right. You’ll be glad you did in the long run. And if you have an old PC, think twice the next time you go to install something that you probably don’t need. I like the following quote from their article ""Simplicity is elegant. The less stuff you have on a system, the more likely it is to run cleanly." –Roger Kay, analyst, Endpoint Technologies Associates .
