HP / DELL Crapware Gone Wild

Bill Tudor — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 09:02:22 GMT

Why would a company act against its own best interests?

A while back, I purchased a Dell Inspiron 6400 from the small business store. My first boot experience can only be described as a nightmare – many minutes of disk crunching craziness only to be left with a useless machine running 79 processes! Seventy-nine! I tried to shut the piece of junk down, but got tired of waiting – killed the power. All I had was the “Dell Recovery DVD”, which promised to restore all 79 processes in their over-bloated crapware glory if I used it. No thanks.

I pulled out a real DVD of Vista (retail), booted, and happily destroyed all partitions on the drive (including the Dell utility partition) with a great big smile on my face. Vista installed nearly in less than the time it took to first-boot the crapware box, and was soon running smoothly with 52 processes. “What a shame”. For Dell, Microsoft, and many many customers.

Why would a company act against its own best interests?

Recently, I was reminded of this experience …

What about HP? / What about today?

Apparently, the situation is no different today, and no different with HP.

I recently had the “pleasure” of examining a two-day-old HP machine (not sure of the model number). I can only imagine how bad the first-boot experience could have been. When I got the machine, the hard drive was still chugging away and the OS was running 78 processes on boot.

Why act against their own best interest?

Why act against their own best interests? Because they don’t think they are acting against their own interests. On the contrary, companies like HP and Dell believe that the price savings realized by installing paid crapware are in their best interest. I can’t image it being worth more than $10-$20 on a $500 machine, but I have no idea. Would that be worth it? Certainly not! The damage done to the company image is much worse than that – unless you can deflect some of that damage to someone else, say, the OS manufacturer?

How many users are willing to wipe their drives clean? Companies like Apple Computer understand. HP and Dell do not.

Fundamentally Wrong

The PC makers are fundamentally wrong on this issue. They are in the business of selling a computer, not an advertising platform. By supplementing their business, they diminish their business.

Microsoft’s Role

Crapware may be bad for HP and Dell, but it is much worse for Microsoft. Microsoft’s role is clear to me – they need to stop this. PC makers have cleverly cast the hardware as theirs, and the software as someone else’s. The crap must be part of the OS, right? Microsoft has two options, the latter being my favorite:

Require that clean OS DVDs be shipped with products
Add a “wipe-out” feature to the OS

What I mean by “wipe-out” feature is that during the first-boot OS installation completion process, the first question asked should be “Do you want to remove useless crapware that has been installed by your PC manufacturer from the computer? If yes, the following occurs:

A driver inventory is taken; signed drivers are tucked away
Format the install partition
Perform an unattended install of the OS.

Take that. Add too much crap and more people will choose the wipe-out option.

The “Start Over” button.