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New PC Woes
by Aaron Smith on Monday, April 9 2007Using Even New PCs Is Ruined by a Tangle Of Trial Programs, Ads talks about the frustrations of purchasing a new machine, only to find it bogged down with so much useless software that the experience of owning a new computer becomes more troublesome than exciting.
We've purchased a few new Dell laptops for office use, and every one that I've worked on has had to be reformatted and re-installed just so it could be used. Let me restate that: directly from the factory, these machines were almost unusable before installing anything.
This is frustrating from a support standpoint because screen reader users are often quick to blame their adaptive software for slow downs and system problems, when many times the problem lies with the convoluted configuration of crapware.
If a customer purchases one of these Dells, and immediately installs Window-Eyes, they're going to have a miserable experience. We're going to get called about it because "Window-Eyes is running slow." And we'll end up spending a lot of time trying to diagnose the problem, when the reformat solution could have been completed in about a half hour.
So if you're planning on purchasing a new laptop, when you get it, here's my advice:
- Open the box
- Find the restore CD
- Restore
- Install Window-Eyes
- Breathe a sigh of relief that you didn't have to deal with 8 hours worth of frustration
