[henrikschroder]

I find that the bundling on PCs have gotten much better in recent years. I bought a Packard Bell laptop for my dad, turned it on, chose the windows language and basic setup, waited half an hour for it to do its thing, and then it was good to go. An almost clean Windows 7 Home Premium, the only extra stuff on it was a 30-day Microsoft something trial, a 30-day Norton trial, and... that's it. And it's not even hard to remove those things if you don't want them.

So the PC experience has gotten a lot better in recent years. I don't know why though, perhaps the industry learned? Perhaps it's not worth it to pre-load it with crap anymore?

[sgk284]

Microsoft actively restricts and controls what can be installed by OEMs now. That's why it's gotten so much better with Win7.

The crappy first use experience was ruining Microsoft's image, because people associated the cruft with them.

[drcube]

Norton is not hard to remove??? Have things changed so much since I switched to Linux? I used to tell people they had to reinstall the OS to get rid of Norton.

I agree that unremoveable and unkillable apps are a huge problem with Android. This is why I switched to Linux in the first place and Google needs to fix it, ASAP.

[leon_]

Yeah, my last PC around 2004 came with Norton. Though I consider myself pretty computer savvy (C programmer) I couldn't remove that thing without reinstalling windows.

Maybe it's different now?

[mlvl-spb-rus]

Removed two Norton apps on a Packard Bell laptop my grandpa chose (and bought) for himself just yesterday. Hope they will not come back. We spend some time teaching him to do basic internet access and (me) assuring that it's no rocket science (by the way, he's an old-school soviet rocket (and not only) engineer, so ;).. )

[ianthiel]

Seeing as that was 7 years ago, yes things are a bit different now =P

[pmr_]

I really can not relate to that. I hat to "configure" a few PCs/laptops (mostly Acer and HP) during the last year. The amount of crapware was shocking and I'm not even talking about the horrible custom OSDs that some manufactures defile computers with.