[solaris]

Originally Posted by Ashleyj

I agree it would be much better if they gave you all this trial stuff on a CD and not pre-installed. But who would ever then install it?

I found to my cost that it creates problems. When I bought my Compaq machine I could not get my HP scanner to work with it - it turned out to be a conflict with the pre-installed HP basic photo editing software. Removing this the scanner works fine with the full software that came with the scanner.

The reason that almost all PCs nowadays come with all this 'crapware' is because it helps reduce the price of the individual PC... A certain percentage of the cost of each PC is covered by Norton etc. in hope that you will renew the trial period that comes with this PC...

Since everybody seems to be as irritated as I am, when having to remove all (or most) of this stuff, then a better idea - than NOT having all this 'crapware' installed from day one and thereby increase the price - would be that the PC Decrapifier (Download | The PC Decrapifier) came as an extra piece of software, since people don't seem to know about it. Then people could just keep the applications they liked and flush the other stuff

Originally Posted by Ashleyj

I have found Acronis to be very good. It keeps an image of whatever partition you want in a protected area of the disk or on a external drive or DVD. Although this area is invisible to the OS (Acronis uses a Linux system to boot into for restoring an image) it can be 'mounted' using Acronis and then seen within Windows Explorer. Once mounted individual files or folders can be viewed and restored.

I have used the image restore function only once and it worked great. After a reboot I was back to a stable system at the point when I had created the back-up. I now create an image every time there are any significant changes i.e. service packs, software releases etc. so if I do have to restore the system should be pretty well up to date.

I will have a look at Image for DOS though.

I thought you said earlier that you weren't somewhat of a PC nerd, Ashley

[Ashleyj]

Originally Posted by solaris

The reason that almost all PCs nowadays come with all this 'crapware' is because it helps reduce the price of the individual PC... A certain percentage of the cost of each PC is covered by Norton etc. in hope that you will renew the trial period that comes with this PC...

Since everybody seems to be as irritated as I am, when having to remove all (or most) of this stuff, then a better idea - than NOT having all this 'crapware' installed from day one and thereby increase the price - would be that the PC Decrapifier (Download | The PC Decrapifier) came as an extra piece of software, since people don't seem to know about it. Then people could just keep the applications they liked and flush the other stuff

Personally I would be willing to pay a bit more to get a 'clean system' - at least the Dell does not come with any AV pre-installed.

Originally Posted by solaris

I thought you said earlier that you weren't somewhat of a PC nerd, Ashley

OK, so I do know a little bit about them.
But I would not classify myself as expert, I just want to be able to turn it on and it works without having to tinker all the time.

[approaching oblivion]

Originally Posted by Dave C

Hi,
Vista is okay, but the main problem which I had / have is that all of the old software which I had on my last computer is not compatible with Vista (things like Adobe professional, photoshop, etc). I know I can probably pay and get an upgrade, but why the hell should I, I have already paid (alot of money) once. I do not have any noticeable problems with speed, but my old computer was v. slow, so perhaps I am just not noticing as the new computer is so much better . If I had my time again, I would have insisted on XP, but I guess you have got to move on at some time,
Cheers,
Dave

I just got a new computer with Vista and had the same problem. A number of my favorite programs are not compatable with Vista and it pissed me off to have to buy Nero again or search through the internet to find a substitute for some of the other programs that I like to use. Speed is no problem since I went to the max on RAM.

The other big problem I ran into today was trying to install my new, 2 terabyte external hard drive and having Vista not being able to install it. All I get is an error message that the drivers can not be installed and I spent most of the morning going through all the trouble shooting steps (to no avail). I still have my other computer with XP and the drive installed fine on it. After looking online I found Vista has a serious issue with adding on hardware and not installing the drivers for them.