Comment by tn13 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tn13 | Hacker News Reader

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Recently purchased a windows and to my horror, despite a i3 processor it was slower than my celeron PC running XP. There was no reason why a machine just unboxed should have been so slow.

Soon I figured out it came with following crapware

1. Google chrome with Bing to be homepage and defautl search engine. I even suspected that Chrome Exe might be bloated so I reinstalled it.

2. It came with Norton antivirus which consistently took up 10% CPU and large chunk of memory.

3. Some intel software which always squatted in background without telling me why it exists.

4. Lenovo's crapware

- There were 11 Lenovo software, each of which I had to uninstall separately. This included some rescue programs to some remote diagonistic programs to some internet security.

5. Did I mention Windows Update ? It was the shittiest of all. First it choked my bandwidth. It slowed down everything. Eventually my screen went blank and my machine restarted on it own. It took around 90 minutes for 71 updates to get applied. I dint even ask for them.

Even all this did not work so I had to change my display settings tuned for performance which is basically windows 95 look and feel for Windows 7.

Overall compared to my macbook which came with very less software but only something that worked as it was supposed to be.

That sounds like it's mostly Lenovo's fault rather than Microsoft's. All the preinstalled software, the excessively out-of-date OS image, and perhaps worst of all -- the preinstalled Norton AV and "internet security" when Windows 8 has AV, antimalware and firewall built-in at no cost.

Not to tout the Surface, but if you had bought that directly from Microsoft, it would've cold booted in about 8 seconds (faster after first run) to <5% CPU usage and minimal to no major updates to download, and no preinstalled crapware to remove.

Probably one of the reasons Microsoft is getting tired of relying on OEMs to sell their OS -- they give customers such a terrible out-of-box experience.

Get machine, wipe HD, reinstall Windows, reinstall drivers.

Windows Update is an unfortunately necessary evil, it becomes more painful the longer it has been since a major Windows release.

Interestingly, the bricks-and-mortar Microsoft Stores seem to sell laptops with a version of Win 8 that has no crapware/bloatware and is optimized to run well; a lot like doing a fresh install.

Worth noting that you can also get these at bigger chains (e.g. Costco, Best Buy, etc.) - like the other comment under/above me said, they're labeled as "Microsoft Signature" or something along those lines.

Yep, "Microsoft Signature".

Since the last service pack especially.

Personally on this Win8 laptop I uninstalled McAfee first to switch to Windows Defender only to find Norton Online Backup was leaking memory too so I uninstalled it too and it was fine after that.

At this point, it feels like Windows AV software makes a machine run far worse than would an actual virus.

Windows Defender is pretty damn good, try it out. The performance overhead is pretty minimal and it is generally well behaved.

Or MSE for pre-Win8 users. (Windows Defender only protects against spyware in pre-Win8)

On crapware, I just posted this suggestion to antitrust authorities etc: http://hal2020.com/2013/01/15/crapware-and-how-we-got-here/#...

Maybe the i3 has a ridiculously slow cpu clock? I had an i7 laptop for work that was painfully slower than an old c2d laptop i bought.

t520 i7 1.6ghz v t400 c2d 2.4ghz

Every computer I own runs better with Windows 8 then Windows 7. Maybe I got lucky with GPU compatibility but my main CPU is the original dual core from 2006. I doubt the i3 is the problem unless its a GPU conflict or some sort or 3rd party "crapware".

Every computer I own or use runs better with Linux Mint than with Windows.

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