Surf the Mind

In preparation for my road trip next week, I picked up a new, what should be screaming fast, laptop yesterday. It was preloaded with Vista, which I’ll just have to suffer with for now since not all the fancy doodads on this thing have XP drivers, so I knew it wasn’t going to be quite as screaming as it would be with just XP, but I wasn’t prepared for the sluggish brick that all the bloatware turned it into.

The first thing I did was burn recovery CDs… after all, when you start wholesale deleting and uninstalling things, you never know what can go wrong.

The last laptop I bought required me to burn recovery CDs too, so I was prepared. I picked up a spindle of blank CDs but just about choked on my coffee when the program requested SEVENTEEN (17) CDs!!! I grabbed the spindle of blank DVDs instead, and burned the bloatware to three of those.

What the heck can they be adding to this poor laptop to fill 17 CDs! Even the most loaded up Linux distro, with Open Office, Gimp and seventeen million other applications I’ll never use, include only six CDs.

Ah well, after two and a half hours of burning, I finally started removing apps.

Norton’s gone, all of HP’s little helper apps are trashed, the lame game stuff is removed, and all of Microsoft’s little helpful ‘extras’ are eliminated.

And another two hours are gone.

Finally, I get around to installing my own apps: Firefox, Thunderbird, Homesite, Filezilla, Zonealarm Suite, Stylus Studio, Open Office.

Another hour and a half gone.

Another hour customizing everything and adding firefox plugins, custom home tabs in custom profiles in firefox, configuring email, bookmarking the important stuff…. and it’s finally done.

And this was the laptop that was going to help me be productive.

Sheesh.

10.1" Laptop Sleeve Case Bag Cover For HP Mini 110 1000 US $4.74 End Date: Thursday Sep-09-2010 14:28:18 PDT Add to watch list

HP/ Compaq 515 Laptop, 2.2 GHz, 4G RAM, AMD, BRAND NEW! US $499.00 (0 Bid) End Date: Thursday Sep-09-2010 14:28:33 PDT Add to watch list

AC Adapter Power Supply Charger for HP Compaq Laptop US $0.01 (0 Bid) End Date: Thursday Sep-09-2010 14:28:35 PDT Add to watch list

Add Ebay to YOUR blog

One Response to “Bloatware sucks.”