Crapware Maddness

Far to much rubbish on a new laptop

It’s been a long long time since I bought a new PC. The usual scenario is to rip the stuff that’s good out of my old system, buy some new great stuff slap them together with some spit and sticky tape. I’ve had retail versions of Windows from 3.0 through to Vista (and I’m running Windows 7 Beta on one machine as well)

Today I received a brand new Toshiba Satellite-Pro U400, primarily to run Office. We are exclusively Mac at work and I just can’t live with Office for Mac – and iWork, well, enough said!

Said laptop comes licensed with Vista Business (OEM), no disk, no lovely curved box just a slip of paper that tells you how to burn a DVD and a hidden partition on the HD that eats away a chunk of the available 120Gb.

But worse still was the crapware that gets pre-installed without even a by your leave. After an excruciating first start up that kicked in a multitude of installers I ended up with, and this is on a brand new machine;

• 11 Taskbar process plus the battery, wifi, speaker and clock.
• 14 desktop shortcuts plus the Recycle Bin
• 2 additional Sidebar widgets
• 6 additions to the Welcome Screen

…and a system that takes 4 minutes to boot to the desktop.

Toshiba – FAIL