Mrs. TOTWTYTR wanted a netbook so that she could “keep in touch with the world” when she’s down visiting our Grandson, his personal care attendant, and his chauffeur. So, we went to Micro Center, which is a great and very dangerous store, to look at the various offerings.
We settled on a very nice Acer Aspire One 10.1 inch screen model. The purchase was uneventful and the sales guy didn’t even try to upsell us much stuff that we didn’t need. In fact, when I mentioned a memory upgrade he suggested that we try it as it came out of the box first and only upgrade if the computer was too slow.
This morning I took the computer out of the box to do the initial start up and set up routine. Not a big deal, it takes about an hour or so, including downloading updates. This computer came with Windows 7 Starter, which is pretty easy to use even though I’ve never seen it before. The features are different than XP, but not that much different.
Connection to our home WiFi network was easy. I downloaded the updates and did the required restart. Which is where the hate part comes in. Most new computers come loaded with a bunch of “free” crap, that really isn’t free. It’s a bunch of come ons that try to get you to buy stuff by giving you free 30 or 60 days trial versions of their products. One of these is the McAfee anti everything suite, which automatically connected to the Internet on restart and tried to get me to register the free product. I’ve had experience with McAfee and have found that it is a resource hog. For that reason I won’t use their products under any circumstances, even if it’s free. Nor am I interested in some free Ebay software, or the free Norton anti everything that they include. Actually, Comcast includes Norton 360 free to subscribers which is what I plan to use since it’s simple to keep updated.
As a result, I’m going to have to unload all of the “free” stuff before I can put on the stuff she actually wants, like Firefox, Thunderbird, Office. Actually, they include a free 60 day trial version, but I’ll probably uninstall that and put on
the real version I have.
Not a big deal, but it’s just another hour or so I don’t need to spend. I really wish that computer companies would realize that most people don’t want that free crap because it really isn’t free and ties up time and resources.
Oh, and they decided that the Mrs. wanted iGoogle as her home page in Internet Explorer. Thanks.
Well, at least they didn’t include a free 30 day membership to AOL, so that’s a plus.
Would this be a bad time to say that you could have had Ubuntu installed in 20 minutes, with no bloatware?And it comes with Firefox, Thunderbird, and (Open) Office. And no antivirus needed …[ducks]
I know, but it's the Mrs' computer and I don't think she'd want to get used to a new GUI and OS. Even though it would be mostly transparent. Nor would I want to have to learn to trouble shoot a new OS, other than on a spare computer that I don't depend on. Which brings me to a question. Is there some sort of Windoze emulator available for Linux? I have some radio programming software that is Windows based, which would preclude me from redoing my netbook with Linux unless there is a way to run those programs.
There is a Windows emulator, WINE. However I haven't been able to get any of my radio programming software to work with it. Older versions had issue with emulating the serial ports, esp. if you are using a serial to USB adapter. In fact that is the only reason I haven't converted to Linux fully. I did convert my mother to it, and she hasn't had any issues using it.If you do run Linux, you should still run anti-virus.
I spent about 4 hours cleaning up my mother's computer on Saturday. It was full of spyware, McCafee crap and other "free" stuff. My nephew had apparantly decided to help and turned an already slow machine into molasses. If you're willing, there's a website that tells you what's important in startup, and what's not. I think it's sysinfo.org, or something similar. I don't know msconfig is run in Windows 7, if it's even there, but it has a section where you can turn off the things that run at startup. There's very little that needs to run and anything running hogs resources.