Rich Stern
Well-Known Member
I was setting up a new PC for my mother-in-law. An HP/Compaq something or other.
When I initially started the machine, it went through it's XP setup process. I noticed during subsequent reboots, it was painfully slow.
Then I realized, with it's 256MB of RAM, it was bottlenecked because of all the "free/included" software. Anti-spyware. Anti-virus. Realplayer. AOL startup. And a bunch of other stuff. Most with some type of "register now/get updates" reminder. With all of this stuff in memory, the PC had no RAM left for user applications. So it was swapping.
Who's PC is this, anyway? This pre-installed software marketing crap is out of hand.
I cleaned it up, uninstalled a bunch of mostly useless software, and the PC runs fine now, but it leaves me wondering. What happens if you buy these products and you don't have the expertise or someone else to solve these problems for you?
It's abusive. It's not just HP. I've had recent, similar experiences with Toshiba and Dell.
When I initially started the machine, it went through it's XP setup process. I noticed during subsequent reboots, it was painfully slow.
Then I realized, with it's 256MB of RAM, it was bottlenecked because of all the "free/included" software. Anti-spyware. Anti-virus. Realplayer. AOL startup. And a bunch of other stuff. Most with some type of "register now/get updates" reminder. With all of this stuff in memory, the PC had no RAM left for user applications. So it was swapping.
Who's PC is this, anyway? This pre-installed software marketing crap is out of hand.
I cleaned it up, uninstalled a bunch of mostly useless software, and the PC runs fine now, but it leaves me wondering. What happens if you buy these products and you don't have the expertise or someone else to solve these problems for you?
It's abusive. It's not just HP. I've had recent, similar experiences with Toshiba and Dell.