Thoughts from the abyss

Have you bought a new PC lately? It’s almost scary if you do. A neighbor of mine just recently bought a new HP machine. It’s actually a decent machine loaded with nice hardware, for the price he paid. I, of course, came to be in charge of setting everything up for him because he’s not exactly computer savvy. I booted his new machine up and was planning on simply updating all the software…Winblows updates, Anti-Virus, and firewall. I was in for a surprise.

It booted up fairly fast, so I’m thinking great, this is a nice fast little machine for his computing experience. I signed in, and that’s where my opinion changed. It took forever for the damn thing to get logged in, and it was more sluggish than anything. I immediately think what’s wrong with this thing. It has a fairly fast hard drive, a 64 bit Athlon chip, and 512MB of memory…that should be fast. I head into the Control Panel, and then over to the Add/Remove Programs to find the culprit.

Here I found the largest software list I have ever seen on a preloaded machine before. I scrolled down and down and down, and it seemed there was no end to the list of applications that came installed. Immediately I started uninstalling software. I actually stopped counting at 30 applications that simply didn’t need to be there. They had printer software installed for almost every HP printer known to man. They had camera software installed for almost every digital HP camera ever made. They had digital imaging software packages upon digital imaging software packages installed. Like I said, I stopped counting packages at the number of 30, and I ended up removing more than that.

What was supposed to be a fast, turn it on, update it, and show the guy how to use it, turned out to be a two and half hour ordeal taking shite off that shouldn’t have been there to begin with. Had it been my machine, I would have returned the machine for a refund. What a waste of time I will never gain back in my life. What’s more disconcerting, is the fact that when, not if, the machine crashes, as soon as I run the recovery portion, I’ll be back to where I began. Long story short, after uninstalling all the garbage installed, the machine actually functions like an Athlon 64 bit machine should. So here comes my warning, watch what machines you buy and try to see what’s installed before you make a purchase. You can save yourself some headaches dealing with machines that are so bloated with utter crap, that you find it slower than a PC that’s 5 years old.