The PC industry has been in a race to the bottom since whenever. Part of the situation is the subsidizing of cheap systems by filling them with Shovelware. Manufacturers are paid x amount of dollars by software companies to install trialware and samples of programs that work for 30 days then expire or require some form of payment for continued operation. Well, as most of us know this results in a less than ideal user experience. 1- because the system runs slower. 2- you are continually nagged to subscribe and upgrade. 3- hdd space is filled with, well, crap! So, do you actively avoid purchasing systems that are filled with this sort of junk? Or maybe it doesn't matter, and you just reformat and reinstall straight out of the box. Or perhaps build your own instead..!
No way will I order from any vendor who installs anything other than the OS and necessary drivers. When the time comes to retire my current PC, I will either build my own or order one from Magic-Micro with no OS installed and no hard drive as they can be purchased for less somewhere else. About three years ago, a friend ordered a Sony laptop from Newegg and on arrival I was asked to image the hard drive. The total size of the Windows 7 install out of the box was just under 50 Gig ! Ridiculous ! After removal of all trial software, sample audio, video, and photo files and general clean-up, the best I could do was to reduce the total install size to about 22.5 Gigabytes. Still 3 times what it should be and even with a Core i5, 8GB of RAM, and less than 30% of the hard drive filled, it never ran as it should until the hard drive was securely wiped and "7" was reinstalled minus all of the crap.
Agreed. I've never had a choice as all my computers were bought from shop displays. I also find occasionally something useful to keep...
I never reformat as I like some of the included manufacturers utilities, and don't want to have to go to the trouble of having to manually install them after a clean install.
