Monday, October 24, 2005 12:08 PM szurgot

New computer woes - Part 1 - Too much trial software.

My son's computer died this week, and rather than try to figure out what was wrong, and buy piecemeal parts, I just picked up a new HP/Compaq and CompUSA. $400 for a 1.8 Ghz machine, 256MB memory, 40GB HD, lots of ports, media readers, etc...

A really good deal in general, but man, they put a lot of Junk on a new PC. I had to pull off trial software for about 5 programs, and somethng like 30 little toy games that they pre-install for "trial and purchase" The new computer was nothing but a "billboard" for all these other pieces of software...

Fortunately, I was able to remove the software, and that freed up about 1/2 the hard drive, so that's good to go...

But man, did it run slow... (See next post)

Comments

# re: New computer woes - Part 1 - Too much trial software.

Monday, October 24, 2005 12:27 PM by Police

When I bought my laptop, I turned it on to take a peek, reformatted, install Windows (+ Linux on 2nd part.), and download the latest drivers from the manuf. site. This is my same routine when I get complaints from relatives' computers, which includes the extra step of installing AV and antispyware, and installing Firefox depending on my evaluation of the user.