The Consumerist (and Best Buy) got some stuff right, and some wrong, IMO. Just for background info, I'm the founder of a rapidly growing I.T. consulting company, with both individual, small business, and corporate clients.
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every time, refusing to uninstall anything, my copy of the special Norton Removal Tool that can be downloaded was "out of date" (I had downloaded it just three weeks before), and the Norton website was broken and wouldn't allow me to download a new copy.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.
Well how do you expect them to lure you into the store in the first place if they have higher prices than their competitors? Everyone in the article seemed to be going after advertised specials.
People are generally willing to momentarily overlook long term pain for short term gain.
not trying to ignite yet another tiring round of the age-old mac-versus-pc debate (really!), but it's only fair to point out that macs do come with a 'clean os'. no trialware, spyware, or junky oem apps or drivers, ever.
I think everyone would agree that getting a truly clean PC would be nice. The problem with Best Buy's approach is the pre-optimizing of the PC first, and having only that version available. IMO, it's counter to the way they built their reputation - non-pushy, non-commission, knowledgeable/trained sales people. I just hope it's not a sign of the direction they think they can head now that Circuit City is out of the picture as a competitor.
I suspect instead that their thinking went something like this:
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.
...and then, they noticed that one version is significantly more profitable and then they "screwed up their inventory management" so the profitable version is always more available.
However, the behavior of intelligent non-pushy sales is not what people want. Customers have voted with their wallets that they want the cheapest price "no matter what".
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.
The free version of Avira by default puts up a splash screen on almost every reboot, and then also regularly shows a temporary notification above the system tray nagging the user to upgrade.
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.
Do you bother doubling up with Windows Defender at all? Or just recommend running Avira solo? The reason I ask is that Defender is a bit of a memory hog and I wouldn't be unhappy about getting rid of it.
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.
We don't bother with Defender in XP; Vista's version seems to be a little better, although that might just be an artifact of running on newer machines. I haven't had a chance to play with Windows 7 yet, unfortunately.
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.
> 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.
20 minutes? Skilled technician?
Maybe I'm missing something here, but this task seems to be just re-imaging the hard drive.
You would have to maintain images of each individual model, complete with up-to-date drivers from the manufacturer as well as Windows updates and other such stuff.
...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 used to really like AVG, but I don't recommend it anymore. It's just gotten too big and drifted too far away from its roots. We haven't had any real problems with it though, other than 1 upgrade that the user botched somehow.
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.
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.