OT: New personal laptop experience

So I finally purchased a new laptop to replace our existing Toshiba Satellite Pro. The system is showing its age in its performance given the processor and memory, the experience we get the most and hate is when the system (many times just IE) hangs.

I purchased a Lenovo laptop through my employee discount and I bought an Ideapad. I didn’t want the cheapest laptop but I also didn’t want a workstation replacement. Both my wife and daughter commented on how cute/stylish it was and I noticed that the touchpad had the technology that Mac originally put out where your fingers can resize information on the screen. I haven’t had a lot of time to play with that but I had not realized the feature was on this model.

Ok so the reason to post this – I can’t believe the amount of software (I see it more as junk) that gets preloaded on the computer. With one exception, a browser solution called KidZui there was nothing I wanted yet I had to walk through numerous configuration screens and I now have all these icons in my taskbar. I am not an extreme minimalist but argh this is too much. What frustrated me most is that to get this new laptop up and running so I could use it without interruption is about the same time it is going to take me to insert a Windows 7 RC disk and format the whole thing.

I always cringe when I see family and friends computers at the amount of stuff they have loaded and now I see how it starts.

TomL

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 15, 2009
  I agree completely. I've noticed over the years that this has become increasinly worse. Unfortunately Windows Vista seems to be riddled with vendor software "add-on" garbage which slows down the PC and ultimately gives "Vista" a bad name. If you were to rewind a few years and ensure vendors kept it clean, I'm sure the world would think differently about the OS. Let's just hope they don't do the same with Windows 7.