Wait, installing software on a laptop negates the vendor's warranty? I thought the whole point of owning a general purpose computer rather than, say, some embedded device was the flexibility to install (and write) whatever programs you want.

Note that people can still be root on their iPhones if they wish--it's just not a supported configuration, because, unlike with a computer, "supporting" a phone has different connotations and more implied responsibilities for a company. Apple has never actively tried to stop people from jailbreaking their phones, they've just tried to stop people from blaming anything that happens after they do on them. It's like blaming a theme park for injuries you sustain if you blowtorch the restraining bars off yourself and jump from the ride when you're 50 feet in the air.

Doesn't jailbreaking void your warranty? And then there's this quote: Every iPhone update from iTunes disables Jailbreak. Every time Apple comes out with an update for iPhone, they find a way to prevent hackers from cracking the code again. Hackers then scramble to Jailbreak the iPhone again and release the new methods. That means if you like to download Apple’s iPhone updates, you are going to have to figure out each time how to Jailbreak your iPhone yes again. Do you really want to play this cat and mouse game? http://www.appleiphonereview.com/iphone-tutorials/iphone-jai...

And this: http://consumerist.com/2009/07/apple-argues-jailbreaking-iph...

At some point, isn't one of the software providers going to want their money back from Best Buy sales since Best Buy is removing their "advertising"?

[1] As far as I know, no one offers "optimization" on a mac, so buying one is less annoying. EDIT: this is wrong: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1032781

http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/

1: Laptops and vendor computers certainly could use a thorough going-over when they're unboxed. Of the various vendors, Dell is the least offensive this way, and Acer is one of the worst.

1a: Most vendors are installing various Norton or Symantec products by default, one of the worst anti-virus products available on the market. Norton's actual catch rating is -- literally -- only about 50%, and to get even that high, it has measurable negative impacts on system performance. Notably, it has a pernicious bug in its email scanner that can cause it, spontaneously, to interrupt email service several months down the road. Removing Norton is not as easy as you might think. Inexplicably, the removal process varies from system to system. On one memorable system, it took me two hours to remove it; its own uninstaller crashed every time, refusing to uninstall anything, my copy of the special Norton Removal Tool that can be downloaded was "out of date" (I had downloaded it just three weeks before), and the Norton website was broken and wouldn't allow me to download a new copy. The computer would not reboot into safe mode -- upon starting in safe mode it would reboot back to normal -- and initial attempts at manual removal caused the program to reload its files upon reboot. Despite having a fully updated version of Norton, the computer was riddled with viruses and other garbage.

1b: The "cleanup" is not something I'd recommend for the average user -- and I'm all for teaching users how to use their computer. Unfortunately, it's gotten very hard to tell what to keep from what to throw away. There are no clues other than experience. For example: Dell's moronic "wireless manager" can't be uninstalled without taking the laptop's wireless drivers with it, but there's a way to disable it and let Windows handle the wireless interface, which is more reliable and reduces clutter in the system tray.

2: Where Consumer Reports found a decrease in system speed, it's likely that "Geek Squad" accidentally removed one of the manufacturer's OS updates.

3: If the "cleanup" was done right, and if it was truly optional, $40 is a really fair price for it. Even if we assume that they've got some in-house tools that automate this, the process would likely still take at least 20 minutes and require oversight by a skilled technician. Part of my business is about kicking Geek Squad in the pants every chance I get, but I doubt I could beat that price.

4: There are some system tweaks that can really help things along, that wouldn't show up on a benchmark. One that comes to mind immediately is the particularly stupid network-related services configuration in Vista. The services aren't started automatically, so for dialup users especially this means a very long wait time every time the user opens up Internet Explorer for the first time.

5: Sending users to "msconfig" without directions was a particularly stupid move by Consumerist. The registry at least looks scary enough to ward off most novices, but msconfig makes things really easy to change -- and can result in very strange system behavior.

6: I have not been impressed by CCleaner, nor does PC Decrapifier do a very good job of cleaning up a new system. CCleaner has given me some work in the past in the form of newly unreliable printer behavior, and we tried using PC Decrapifier for a while before concluding that we could actually do the job much faster manually.

7: Spybot Search & Destroy is really not that great as a preventative program. Avira (http://free-av.com/) is a much better piece of software, also free, although the free version has two annoying habits which can be disabled easily.

So, should new systems be "optimized" by trained techs working for a company that actually cares about its customers? Hell yes. Unfortunately, neither Best Buy nor Geek Squad got it right.

1) Crapware makers pay PC makers to pre-load their crapware<br/> 2) PC makers use (some of) the money to reduce their selling price<br/> 3) Best Buy removes (some of) the crapware and increases the price again

Why not just sell a computer with a clean OS? Why on earth should a brand new machine need work?

I'm not knocking your services, thaumaturgy, just saying it shouldn't be necessary to optimize a new machine.

If the computer industry really put its customers needs first, I wouldn't have this job.

And that would be OK by me.

People are generally willing to momentarily overlook long term pain for short term gain.

We want to provide this service for our customers, but we can't afford to do it post-sale. For one, it'll take longer, and for two, customers won't wait an extra 20 minutes to pick up their shiny new laptop.

So instead we'll provide both versions, and let the customer decide.

...and then, like almost every retailer in existence, they just screwed up their inventory management.

These days, most big companies use off handed tricks to boost their sales, whether that be selling Monster Cables or stacking magazine subs to the tickets. The notable lack of these tricks seems to be Wal-Mart though.

To disable the splash screen: open up regedit, go to HKLM->Software->Microsoft->Windows->CurrentVersion->Run, find the "avgnt" key, and add " /nosplash" to its value.

To disable the nagging: in Windows XP Pro and most versions of Vista, navigate to Avira's program folder, find the "avnotify" executable, and disable Read & Execution in its security settings. If you don't see the security tab in its properties dialog, then go up to the Tools menu for the folder view, choose options, scroll down to the bottom of the advanced options, and disable "simple file sharing". For other versions of Windows (Windows XP Home, some configurations of Vista (I think)), you have to reboot into safe mode to do this. This will not prevent Avira from notifying you of infections or other actual alert events.

We recommend Avira because -- according to extensive testing by http://www.av-comparatives.org/ as well as in our own experience -- Avira is consistently one of the top free antivirus programs in terms of catch rate, while also running only one monitoring process and otherwise having a very very low impact on system performance.

I had to give up using AVG (it was adding several minutes onto my netbook's startup time) so tried Avast. It was okay until I couldn't figure out how to stop it running a full system scan every day that would lock me out of doing anything useful with the machine.

I then tried Comodo but that was an awful resource hog. It really slowed my system down and I couldn't stand to use it. It also quarantined the netbook's touchpad driver as a potential virus without much of a message to tell me what was going on so that didn't make me like it too much.

Avira has been pretty good so far. The splash screens are a minor annoyance but nothing major. I had some problems updating it for a while but that seemed to have been a momentary problem. I'd recommend it.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that -- though I don't know how, it was a serious pain for several months.

Avira's update servers were located in Germany, and would completely fall over every time the continental U.S. decided to update. If your update schedule was done in the middle of the night, it wasn't so bad.

Avira-the-company at first blamed its user's network connections, and then admitted that their update servers were completely overwhelmed. They do seem to have recently fixed this, but only in the last month or so, so we're still waiting to see if it's a long term fix or not.

If this happens to you, you can always run a manual update. Go to http://www.avira.com/en/support/vdf_update.html , download the file, then go to Avira's control panel. I think the menu is labeled "Tools", and "Manual Update" is below that.

What about SpywareGuard and SpywareBlaster?

I previously used AVG but found it very annoying. Currently using Defender, SG, SB and then any clean-ups with MBAM.

Avira by itself has been fairly successful for us (but we also encourage clients to use Firefox+AdBlockPlus, which stops a popular virus vector). The only hiccup we've had was with a new version of "Windows Security 2009" that slipped past Avira for a couple of days and spread by Outlook address books. MalwareBytes didn't find it either, but fortunately it's easy to remove manually.

The little bit that I've worked with SpywareGuard, I've liked it, with the caveat that it can require a lot of user interaction during software installs.

Haven't used SpywareBlaster.

I run a few sites that depend on ads so I've been reluctant to use an ad-blocker, but it might make sense to look into it.

Thanks again.

20 minutes? Skilled technician?

Maybe I'm missing something here, but this task seems to be just re-imaging the hard drive.

...which isn't really a bad way to go if your product line only has a few different models of computer.

You would also risk having technicians load outdated images onto new units, and as we've seen from the article, they were having trouble just keeping all of the same items from the same box together.

I try to remember that, for users, antivirus software is a nuisance. They don't want something that requires a lot of their attention, and they don't want something that slows down their system. They don't even want to be able to suspect their antivirus software of having any kind of negative impact on their system.

They just want to get work done, look at pictures, browse the web, play games, that sort of thing.

It's funny: I remember when Norton was really great, especially its disk tools. Then it got bloated, slow, and ugly, and McAfee came along and was great. Then McAfee got bloated, slow, and ugly, and there was AVG. Then AVG...

I'm sure Avira will do the same thing, so we're keeping an eye out for the next best thing.

Another benefit to the article, I think the bottom section listing programs to "optimize" the PC is useful. Only thing I would have added is that cable/dsl internet services these days are likely to provide a free anti-virus from McAfee.

I have never used a machine with the default OS install on it, and I have never had any hardware support problems. (And this includes my XP machines at work. Definitely not the default HP Windows install, but the hardware works fine nonetheless.)

I've had good luck with the system disks (optional) from Acer and HP. You have to order them separately but they usually have 2 disks - the OS disk and the driver/software disk. Granted, this means someone has to have the foresight to order the disks, and reinstall the OS - not something I would recommend to an average PC buyer.

Most laptops have fine hardware, it's just that the default Windows installs come with a lot of ads to keep the price low (or more likely, the profit margin higher). Save yourself the trouble and delete the ads before they even get the chance to be executed.

On some units, you even lose ethernet, so you're not only stuck with a horrible screen resolution until you fix it, but you also have to load the drivers on via usb.

And finally: I don't know of a manufacturer right now that provides you with a real actual Windows disk when you buy your computer. You generally get instead an OEM "reinstall" disk which puts all that wonderful crap back on your system.

I really really wish Linux could get a serious hold on the consumer market.

So then Linux machines would ship with a ton of crapware too?

This is not the case with Windows, which was the point.

I can't figure out how to build servers cheaper than their equivalent abmx.com counterparts -- ignoring cases where I buy an 8-bay unit and then purchase the drives separately.

In fact, to go further out on a limb: it's been a while since I've seen any computer system in the consumer market for sale and thought to myself, "I could build one like that for less". Which sucks, because it would be great if I could do that, stick my own label on them, and sell 'em.

I'm sure you can wipe it and install Windows (or a better OS) from scratch yourself.

I am not volunteering to do these tests.

And then walked out because I could not buy what I wanted without their "optimizations".

I simply will not deal with retailers who do this.

This is true of almost all retail stores, which is why I pretty much only shop online now. The brick-and-mortar stores want to blame sales tax or too-low online prices for their woes, but the reality is that they only sell crap. Most people do not want to buy crap, and don't. As a result, the brick-and-mortar stores that only sell crap are not doing too well compared to the online stores that sell things people actually want to buy.

(Notice how Apple's retail stores do fine. This is because they actually sell good products.)

Their computers range the gamut, but so does Dell.com. Most Best Buys now even have an extensive selection of Macs on their own wooden table. They've got every mp3 player worth considering (and many not). I bought my Diamond Rio there back in what must have been 98 or 99.

Amazon sells most electronics for about the same price as them. I just looked for my camera, the Cannon Powershot. $149 for the newer model at both places. (Perhaps time for me to upgrade).

It's really the sales tax that ruins the business case for shopping there. A copy of Halo is $3 more at Best Buy, and I have to wait in line. When my business bought a Macbook, we saved $100 buying it from Amazon. I could have gotten the same thing off the shelf at Best Buy or an Apple Store, but why pay extra?

And the computers I wouldn't buy there due to lack of customizability, which was the original point of the comment. Even my dad just orders them off the net because of that.