A couple of months ago a buddy got his new iMac delieved to work. He let us watch as he unboxed it and booted it for the first time. Apple knows what they are doing when it comes to the initial user experience. It automatically tried to detect the wireless mouse and keyboard and when it couldn’t it gave nice visual directions showing how to insert the batteries and it all just worked. It was a seemless user experience that anyone could have completed. Now as most people know, I’m not a Mac guy. It’s not because they aren’t great computers, it’s because they are so expensive. The point, however, is that most PC’s don’t have the same intial user experience. In fact, I would say that setting up your new PC is usually pretty frustrating. You have to uninstall all of the unwanted programs, tweak other programs so they don’t startup automatically, install programs that it didn’t come with, and then tweak Windows settings. Setting up one of my Black Friday computers took the cake. It was a Compaq brand Desktop and it’s a pretty nice dual core machine with a 17″ widescreen LCD that came as a bundled deal. This is a picture of the screen I got when I powered it up for the first time.

Oh, how nice of Compaq to thank me and tell me about how they are going to help me get set up. But wait, what do I do now? There aren’t any buttons, I press a few keys, click the mouse, hit Esc and nothing happens. Then I notice that a portion of the a button is barely visible and if I mouse over it, it highlights red so I’m pretty sure it’s a button but I have no clue what it does. All I can see is “B” and the rest of the button is off the screen and you can’t move the window over. What could that mean? Begin?

Well, without any other options I clicked the button and I was able to continue and get to Windows where I immediately started uninstalling everything, beginning with the Compaq software which was so extremely helpful. Now it wasn’t all the software’s fault (although I would still consider that poor UI design). It turns out that I had to go into the LCD’s menu and tell it to auto-adjust for it to fit the screen correctly. This took me several minutes to figure out so I can only imagine how long it takes less experienced users. I’m not letting them off the hook as easy as saying it was a minor hardware issue either. This was a complete computer purchased as a bundle. From my user perspective, the experience should have been the same as what you get with a Mac. Then again, you get what you pay for and a Mac would’ve cost a heck of a lot more.