One mans thoughts on Vista and Toshiba

[damoh]

Hi all
Had to share this.
I took delievery of a nice sparkly Toshiba L300D laptop this morning, eager to play i fired it up. Now please bare in mind this was at 10 am.
11 am STILL installing vista. Thought wow this is taking longer then it used to. So, anyway finished installing and reboot. OMG!! Now it has been a while since i used vista and yes been a while since i bought a new laptop. But since when did manufacteurs stuff so much crap into an OS? Would i like a link to amazon? Ebay maybe. seriously i had like 19 icons on the desktop at first boot. And the laptop came crashing down to a halt. was using well over a gig on idle. Anyway, created restore disks, ( fool if i dont i think lol ). Inserted the usb drive with 7 on. Literally 20 mins later im done. I really hope that manufactors dont cram 7 with all the rubbish they do with vista. I know that it is a bloat OS but i had over 25 programs in my msconfig and thats before i installed anything!
So if anyone is here reading this *cough toshiba employee* please bare in mind that you will bring 7 to its knees by cramming it full of stuff.
P.S Laptop is running nice on 7 now. No crap everywhere lol

 

[usasma]

"Crap" is a fact of life with PC's. It goes to help the manufacturer's keep the cost down also. If eBay pays a manufacturer to put their crap on the system - a portion of it will save you some money. The more "crap" the more money you save.

Although the restore disks will have the "crap" on it, they'll also have the drivers and settings that make using the PC relatively painless.

There's several ways to get rid of the "crap"...
- Install Windows fresh off a Microsoft DVD - then go find any missing drivers
- Use a tool (such as PCDecrapifier) to remove it all
- Manually remove each entry that you don't want. Do this for programs, startups, services, etc.

 

[damoh]

"Crap" is a fact of life with PC's. It goes to help the manufacturer's keep the cost down also. If eBay pays a manufacturer to put their crap on the system - a portion of it will save you some money. The more "crap" the more money you save.

Although the restore disks will have the "crap" on it, they'll also have the drivers and settings that make using the PC relatively painless.

There's several ways to get rid of the "crap"...
- Install Windows fresh off a Microsoft DVD - then go find any missing drivers
- Use a tool (such as PCDecrapifier) to remove it all
- Manually remove each entry that you don't want. Do this for programs, startups, services, etc.

But to the likes of you and me doing the above would be relativly easy. Now give that laptop to someone who knows nothing of what your saying above? All that will happen is that they will get frustrated cos they cant do it, then bash the manufacturer and never buy there products again? Hows that saving money?


Or install windows 7?

 

[sjaak327]

The very first thing I do when I get a new system, is get an original Microsof DVD of Vista, or at home, boot using the WDS server, that holds images of Vista and some other operating systems (including Win 7 RC) and reinstall the OS with formatting the harddrive, as indeed the crap that some OEM's load up is beyond belief.

 

[beman36]

or worse they bash not only the manufacturer but the OS itself and then switch to apple! *gasp* I said the A word!

 

[Lordbob75]

LOL guys.

The thing is, crapware is a PROBLEM.
Someone spends $1500 on a computer, only to have it run like a $500 one at startup because of it all!
While keeping the costs down does help, is it worth it?
That, is a personal choice.

I just worked on someones computer today, and he had a brand new, something. Ran ok, but I looked at its specs, and it was just not as fast as it should have been! Crapware strikes again.

There is a point where it is the manufacturers RESPONSIBILITY to provide the POWER and SPEED the customer PAID for. If adding in crapware REDUCES the speed, then the manufacturer needs to CHANGE IT.

~Lordbob

 

[bhuulo]

I like to install my system myself and customize it... no crapare but PCDecrapifier is good thing...

 

[7Dreams]

clean istalling is always better

 

[Tharon]

Not only does the install of Vista take a long long time, but after that is completed. The updates needs to be installed. Both from Microsoft and Toshiba. And especially Microsofts takes a long long long time to install.

Also bare in mind, that if you have bought a system with Vista on, and you have tha ability to downgrade (Wich I call upgrade) to XP Pro. You need to use the cd provided with the whole package when you bought the computer.
This is because the product key that came with XP is a socalled royalty-key. The key will only work on a install-cd that toshiba has made.

PS Sorry bout my bad english.

 

[damoh]

I was actually looking at what this thing installed. As per the second post, yes i understand that companies pay to have there shiny icon on your desktop but as lordbob said, it should be a choice if you have it installed or not. And in my opinion, manufactuers have a right to ensure that you can choose to install this rubbish or not. I mean really if i want an amazon or ebay account, ill go get one myself. Perhaps i should ask toshiba to send me a cheque for the time i spent reinstalling 7 onto a computer i paid for.

But then when you look at it,
2 hours in total to install vista before it can get to a usable desktop.
1 hour to create restore disks, which i did.

15 minutes to wipe it and install 7.
Priceless

 

[beman36]

Also bare in mind, that if you have bought a system with Vista on, and you have tha ability to downgrade (Wich I call upgrade) to XP Pro. You need to use the cd provided with the whole package when you bought the computer.
This is because the product key that came with XP is a socalled royalty-key. The key will only work on a install-cd that toshiba has made.

PS Sorry bout my bad english.

sorry but nowadays U do not have the choice to install XP if desired, I bought an hp laptop and it was almost impossible to install XP, they just dont make the drivers for XP for the laptop, it took me 2hrs of research to find a comparable driver to make a certain hardware work!

 

[stormy13]

You think Toshiba is bad, try Sony. I found this,

a while ago. notice that the scroll bar is only showing about 1/3 of the installed programs list, and that was before they had even installed anything.

I just worked on someones computer today, and he had a brand new, something. Ran ok, but I looked at its specs, and it was just not as fast as it should have been! Crapware strikes again.

Same here, only it was a brand new HP computer. On first boot it took around 5 minutes to get to the desktop. had a quick look in Task Manager and there was almost 70 processes running, and over a dozen things in msconfig. Then proceeded to remove the Norton crapware (trialware) and anything else the person didn't want, as well stop everything that wasn't necessary in msconfig; and once that was done it too about a minute or so from boot to desktop.

 

[Tews]

Vista was the reason I installed Linux .... W7 was the reason I came back!!

 

[sjaak327]

I was actually looking at what this thing installed. As per the second post, yes i understand that companies pay to have there shiny icon on your desktop but as lordbob said, it should be a choice if you have it installed or not. And in my opinion, manufactuers have a right to ensure that you can choose to install this rubbish or not. I mean really if i want an amazon or ebay account, ill go get one myself. Perhaps i should ask toshiba to send me a cheque for the time i spent reinstalling 7 onto a computer i paid for.

But then when you look at it,
2 hours in total to install vista before it can get to a usable desktop.
1 hour to create restore disks, which i did.

15 minutes to wipe it and install 7.
Priceless

2 hours ? usually it takes me 20 minutes to install vista off a normal Microsoft iso

The problem is, that if these companies would make you customise the way they install the os + what crapware is added, this will increase the prices of those boxes.

 

[GatoSoft]

I agree with you all about crapware. I remember when I bought my Acer Aspire 4520 with 1 GB. of RAM and the pre-installed software's consumption of 1,2 GB. of RAM.
Acer must have guts to sell a laptop with software that not suits into the minimun system memory!
Also I remember that it's Vista Home Premium and the 1 GB. memory amount where like this for just a few minutes, so I formatted the OS partition with Windows 7 and upgraded memory to 2 GB.
Now, idle Windows uses 600~700 MB. of RAM and runs smoothly and flawlessly... THAT'S a notebook!

 

[Tyderion]

i bought a student's HP laptop about 1.5-2 years ago with vista preinstalled. except some stupid norton trial there was, luckily, no other crapware installed...
except vista, to say. This was vista before SP1 ... unusable, slow ... etc I hated it from the first moment on.
At least HP was nice enough to give me down- (up?)grade CD's to windows xp with all drivers and after installing that it was usable.
Now with win7 ... it's really nice