> It's loaded with junkware, because paying two grand for a laptop doesn't get you a system that hasn't been sold to someone else.
On this topic, does anyone know of any major manufacturers who dont do this with their consumer machines?
I have had really bad experiences of late with Dell, Toshiba and HP, to the point where they come with what is essentially malware built in. As one example, our latest dell purchase redirects search queries, puts a link to ebay on the desktop which comes back once deleted, and prevents you from adding an alternative search provider to IE.
Yes, Sony and Dell are especially notorious for shoveling garbage onto their laptops. The worst is the pseudo OS X-style dock they all put in there in a failed attempt to make it feel like a Mac. Terrible.
Lenovo isn't too bad. I recently bought a Lenovo laptop for running Windows7 and the only thing I recall having to disable at startup was a boot optimizer (which helpfully had a 'Dont run again' button on it)
HP laptops now provide a barebones restore feature. That is, if you don't mind restoring your system on day one, you can boot to the recovery partition and forego installing all of the extra software after restoring the operating system. I forget their term for this exactly, but it's a nice feature that appeared only recently in their line of laptops.
Cuteness aside, the out of the box experience with a mac is really good. Everything is polished and there are no nag screens when you first boot up. The first experience with a new Apple device seems carefully engineered to make the owner feel almost emotionally attached to it.
Contrast this to a lot of Windows laptops where your first boot requires running the gauntlet of nagware & cruft. The device itself might be just as capable (or more), but you've already either confused or annoyed the new user and reduced the likelihood of that immediate emotional attachment.
I know there are real business reasons why the cruft gets included, but I would argue that there are far more compelling reasons to leave it out.
The first experience with Linux, Ubuntu in particular, is also quite good. I think the reason for this is that, in most people's minds, Windows is the default; everything else has to stand out to even be considered while Windows just has to mostly work.
> On this topic, does anyone know of any major manufacturers who dont do this with their consumer machines?
The Windows install on a Thinkpad I bought a couple of months ago was pretty much crapware free - if I am not mistaken, the only third-party utilities that were installed on the system were ones from Lenovo, for controlling features like power saving, OSD, etc..
On this topic, does anyone know of any major manufacturers who dont do this with their consumer machines? I have had really bad experiences of late with Dell, Toshiba and HP, to the point where they come with what is essentially malware built in. As one example, our latest dell purchase redirects search queries, puts a link to ebay on the desktop which comes back once deleted, and prevents you from adding an alternative search provider to IE.