THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS "DIVA"

Here's an idea that would save a lot of time ...

Forgo Vista. Download Ubuntu. Install Compiz or Beryl (for all the eye candy).

No bloatware. No spyware. No problems.

Either that, or return the HP. Get a Mac. No bloatware. No spyware. No viruses (yet). And...no problems.

...and not be able to run software we need and voiding the warranty and looking for drivers and needing to get up to speed on how to support/control/patch/manage Ubuntu.

One trades one set of problems for another.

www.pcdecrapifirer.com

Easily remove these kind of things... works on most of the shovelware on Dell, HP, etc...

And for a small donation, you can batch it so you can automate it from a USB key

The pricing is definitely better on the AMD proc, but the Intel Core 2 smokes it from a performance standpoint (albeit at a higher cost).

At any rate, when choosing custom configured PCs from HP, it shure would be nice if they had a checkbox for 'no crapware'.  

BTW - nice tip FostWare. Thanks!

The HP desktop I bought earlier this year was also full of crapwar. Worse, some of the apparent 3rd party crapware was necessary to be able to use the machine properly - in particular, the Windows software for creating backups to DVD would not function - you had to use MyDVD plus.  Worst of all, some necessary stuff like IE6 would die about half the time (I know; my browser of preference is Firefox, much more stable, many free tools - but you still have to have IE to get Microsoft updates) so I immediately had to upgrade to IE7.

For years, I never bought anything except HP.  But after this - and having an expensive HP all-in-one printer die after 2 years - I will never buy anything from HP again.

What a disappointment. I switched to HP after getting poor quality from Dell. Then I find a load of crapware, my hard drive partitioned with HP crap and HP unwilling to honor their price protection policy.

It's a shame to see a company's reputation so callously destroyed by marketing and finance wienies.

Orman:

All Windows boxes require a 3rd party application to run the optical drives. Even when you just copy something to a CD via Windows Explorer, there is actually a different burning software doing the work behind the scenes. However if you install another burning program - Roxio or Nero, for example - it will usually take over that Windows function.

J-Mac

Orman -- J-Mac again. I should mention that I was referring only to XP machines, as I have not yet tried running a Vista box.

J-Mac

You should not buy Pavillion models for business use anyway.  They are not business machines and their warranty stinks because you have to send them back for repair.  Local HP Dealers cannot repair them.  Try the Compaq NX series.  These are business machines and can be repaired locally.

It doesn't matter who you buy your laptop or pc from,  (brands, not whitebox) and they all come with crapware. As a rule of thumb, I generally wipe and reformat the drives and reinstall windows as soon as I buy the the thing. I regard the time spent doing this as just an extra cost of purchase. This cost counts even if you install some other OS.