Vista: Preloaded With Gunk

My colleague Walt Mossberg writes a scathing piece about preloaded Vista machines; definitely worth a read. I'm trying installing Vista on a virgin machine, and the experience isn't much better so far.

clipped from ptech.wsj.com I have set up many computers over the years, so I wasn't shocked that the out-of-box experience was less than ideal. Still, I was struck by just how irritating it was to get going with the new Sony Vaio SZ laptop I bought about 10 days ago. It was the first new Windows machine I'd bought in a few years, because I had been waiting for Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system. I was amazed that the initial experience is still a big hassle.

Comments

[John Orford]

totally agree with him!

[Dave J. (Scoop0901)]

From the sounds of you and your associate, the problem may be the OOBE/OEM crap that comes with Vista.

I've installed Vista (three different versions, Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate) on over a dozen machines. A few upgraded WinXP or Win2k, others were fresh installs, and a few were installations on machines I built.

The OEM garbage, with all the "free" crapola they install, such as MusicBox or whatever it is called, along with Real Player and all the other spyware and trialware sucks.

Get yourself a real version, not an OEM version, and see the differences.

[John Orford]

Dave J.,

Yeh, but the point is that about 99%+ of people will use the OEM version.

[Jeremy Wagstaff]

The OEM versions 'cost' less because they're subsidized by all the crap. A clean install is much more expensive. I guess the solution is to do a clean install with the Vista that comes on the OEM machines, but I'm also guessing that's not possible. What has surprised me, however, is how non-OEM Vista doesn't work particularly well on a clean machine -- crashes, drivers that don't work (even on a machine 'designed for Vista', as well as programs that just won't run on Vista.

[Emery Jeffreys]

Craplet is a great name. We'll call the craplets that phone home ET craplets (RealPlayer, etc.).

If Photoshop and iTunes were available for Linux I would have already ditched Windows long ago. I would try Gimp, but I have been using Photoshop too long to learn a new set of commands.

I'm not quite ready for a Mac... but it is tempting.

[John Orford]

"If Photoshop and iTunes were available for Linux I would have already ditched Windows long ago."

You can run both (well PS7 at least) well under Linux. Try CrossOver or Parallels for Linux.

My worry is that Linux will go the way of Vista, once Dell starts preloading it :)

"What has surprised me, however, is how non-OEM Vista doesn't work particularly well on a clean machine"

Jeremy, I'd really love to hear some thoughts on what you think of the new Ubuntu when it comes out (April 19th), perhaps on tenminut.es? It comes by default on a live CD so you should get it up and running in no time.