Beware of Circuit City and other Computer Dealers

I have plenty of experience working on computers. As a result, I gladly assist friends and relatives when they need help. One of my biggest frustrations is dealing with the lousy installations that come from manufacturers. They put on tons of software (garbage) that nobody uses. I don’t have the statistics but these apps significantly slowdown the machines. Most people won’t notice the loss of resources. The machines run fine when they first get them. After you install all your personal applications, wallpapers and backgrounds and then run the larger applications that are memory intensive, you already expect the machine to run slower. You never get the opportunity to run the applications in a pristine state so you don’t realize how nicely the machine can run. The biggest annoyance that the user may notice is on startup. The amount of time it takes to load the OS can double because of these garbage apps.

These garbage apps have several negatives. The consumption of valuable resources is significant but there is another side consequence. Because the vendors have contracts to load this junk, they purposely don’t provide you with the operating system media (CD’s). Instead, they want you to use the recovery disks if you have a problem. The recovery disks preserve all the garbage applications. They also offer few options for reconfiguration. Believe it or not, everyone doesn’t want to install the OS (i.e. Windows) the way the manufacturer does.

It is downright criminal to sell someone a copy of Microsoft Windows and not provide them the CD’s to install at a later date. Frankly, the situation is good for everyone but the consumer. Microsoft doesn’t have to worry about a CD that may get pirated and the manufacturer’s costs are less because they don’t have to provide the CD’s.

Some may think that uninstalling the applications is good enough. Consider this; I worked with a software product once that made over 3,000 changes to the Windows registry. The uninstall program for that product removed about 300 of those registry entries. As bad as that is, you can expect less from the garbage apps being installed by default.

When you purchase a computer, make sure you get the CD’s for all the applications you purchased. If they won’t give them to you; tell them take a hike. I called Circuit City about this issue and their recommendation was to buy a new copy of Windows. That’s right. Spend another $250 just to get the CD’s.

Like I say, it’s downright criminal.