The “Break it Down” Blog

This Christmas brought different laptops to some family members that I ended up helping setup and over all, looking at everything from a brand new Sony, to a new HP, to a new ThinkPad I have to say that I hate Laptop Manufacturers.

There are three reasons for this:

1. They all think creating their own utilities to do things Windows already does, and load them on boot is a great idea. The more the better.
2. They allow every advertiser on the planet to subsidize the cost of the laptops by allowing them to pre-install trial versions of software, half of which you cannot uninstall (easily). Even some software you want off, there is no way to get it off.
3. You make your own recovery disks, we are too cheap to include $1 worth of burned CDs

To put this in perspective, on my desktop at boot if I open the task manager and show processes from all users, I see roughly 12 processes. On my ThinkPad, on boot, if I open the task manager and make it full screen I actually have to hit page down to see the remaining list of processes loaded.

Keep in mind some of these are ThinkPad utilities (about half, and I have no idea what they do) and then others are useless shit that I cannot turn off. Like the InstallShield Updater. I’ve turned it off 4x, naturally it still checks for updates for 2 programs on my computer. I’m not sure why, or who told it to, or what site it’s checking for updates, but it keeps doing it.

To make a long story short I installed Ubuntu on my ThinkPad right after I got it, but after seeing my battery life get cut in half, I went back to Windows and ran the recovery disks I had made when I first got the machine… this was one of the longest computing experiences I’ve ever endured. After Windows goes through it’s normal install and you do the first boot into Windows (at this point the installer is running off the hard drive), there were 2 more hours of utility installs that scroll by all controlled by the largest BAT file I’ve ever seen in my life.

After my ThinkPad rebooted and did it’s initial startup, I was greeted with over a minute logon process and 500MB of Ram used on boot… fantastic.

This is why people still build their own computers when they can. I don’t know how this improves my life as a computer user, but I sure as shit know my battery life, memory and performance are all suffering because of this. The Sony and HP were much the same way, although I didn’t notice such an abusively long list of utilities loaded on boot… just a ton of useless trial software.

Keeping in mind that I sold my MacBook Pro in order to buy this ThinkPad, that was something the Mac did well. On Boot it was a perfectly clean Mac install. Nothing fancy, no advertisements, no trial software, just a clean operating system ready to be used.