Gary Thornock's Weblog

Walter Mossberg's latest column is a reminder of just how much garbage comes bundled with new PC's these days. By "these days", of course, I mean almost since the release of the first consumer-oriented Windows 3.1 PC, although these things seem to get progressively worse over time.

It's a little difficult for me to sympathize, mostly because it's a problem I pretty much never see. My Powerbook didn't come with that extra junk installed, unless you count a trial version of Microsoft Office (which I removed). The Compaq laptop I bought back in 2000 probably did, but the first thing I did when I got that home was boot Partition Magic from a floppy and remove the factory Windows ME installation, and the second thing was install Linux (Red Hat 7 at the time; it now runs SimplyMEPIS, because for some reason it doesn't play nicely with the FreeBSD KDE port, and I don't want to spend the time to figure out why not.) I'm sure the various company laptops I used in my years at Sento and my all-too-brief time at Provo Labs came with lots of junk too, but again, the first step in preparing them to do Actual Work (which meant web and database development, at both companies) was to run Darik's Boot and Nuke, and the second step was to install FreeBSD (or SimplyMEPIS, on one laptop whose network card wouldn't work with FreeBSD. Again, I didn't want to spend the time to figure out why not, since Google wasn't turning up any immediate fixes.)

It's great to have choices :)