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Comment by primitivesuave | Hacker News Reader

The only people who would need such a service are people who are completely technologically illiterate and only know of the Firefox brand, and those people may not be informed enough to know that it's free.

Dell needs to weigh the gain of a small amount of money with the price of losing their integrity and consumer trust.

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I wasn't aware any PC manufacturers had integrity or consumer trust left, the least of which being Dell. Have you fired up a newly shipped Dell PC lately? It's a cesspool of crapware. No less than a dozen Dell Utilities, "anti-virus", media players, etc.

Don't worry though, they'd be happy to work on your "slow" computer if you purchase the support add-on.

Dell, Lenovo, Sony have all offered options for "Clean Install of Windows 7/8" for as long as I remember. And without charge, mostly, despite the discounted pricing the manufacturer could offer by virtue of the "partnerships".

"No less than a dozen Dell utilities" - you mean, like to customize LED colors, change function key behavior?

Yeah. When I bought a Dell a couple of years back, I checked my options carefully and the only crapware it came was McAfee (which, I mean, I'd rather they ship a crap antivirus program by default than leave most customers with no malware protection at all).

I was disappointed to find my new Lenovo Ideapad similarly loaded down with crap. Spent a few hours just installing nonsense.

Indeed, last time I bought a name brand computer (my Lenovo Laptop) I was really disappointed to find how much crap was installed on it. I ended up formatting and re-installing :/

Pretty much all consumer PCs are that way. Do a clean OS reinstall out of the box. Unfortunately most consumer PCs don't ship with the media needed to do this.

No need for installation media when you're on Windows 8. It has a built-in reinstall/refresh function. Just go to the Start screen and type reinstall.

And I trust the reinstall program that lives on the same system with this crapware why? I want a fresh install from Microsoft-signed media, not the crapware re-installing itself while it wipes all user-data.

In the immortal words of Ellen Ripley: Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

totally agree,lol, i'd format the hardrive too just in case. 10 times if needed...

I have a great Dell Latitude E6320. 8G RAM, i5 Sandy Bridge and 250GB HDD. It's basically a tank with Magnesium and Aluminum. It fell from 1.6m right on its VGA connector which was pushed inside, but still works.

First thing I did was installing Ubuntu, though. Same as my desktop Dell.

PS: It's the only computer that gets WiFi while all others find it too weak of a signal. I'm online while all my friends shut their laptops.

I bought a laptop 4 years ago (Dell Studio 17) and I was actually quite impressed with the lack of bloat on it. It was pretty much just the Dell software that you'd expect, and nothing else.

4 years ago wasn't that long ago, I hope nothing has changed...

One might buy the computer as a present and want to surprise the gifted with Firefox already installed. Presents don't look that good unwrapped, so as they cannot install it themselves the only option left is to pay Dell to do it.

No offense, but you're stretching credulity here. Even better, if you're giving a gift of a Dell computer, help the person you're giving it to to install Firefox after the fact and show them what wonderful free software is out there on the internet.

> The only people who would need such a service are people who are completely technologically illiterate and only know of the Firefox brand, and those people may not be informed enough to know that it's free.

Not really, I can think of a use case where an office has a policy that requires everyone to be using Firefox. Now, say they need to buy a hundred new PCs from Dell. Wouldn't it be time consuming and costly to install Firefox on each PC one by one? In this case, paying for this service could make sense.

I really hope that anyone buying hundreds of PCs has their own Windows images ready made and is using deployment services.

I use to work for a small OEM that primarily serviced local (quarter of the state or so) school districts and small businesses. Often the customers would request that we flash the computers with an image that they provided. Basically meant that we could go to the school in the evening, install the computers in all the different computer labs, and the next morning those computers would boot and be ready to go.

Obviously there was a good deal of trust required there, but for organizations with moderately sized computer orders (10 to 300 typically) but small IT staffs, it made a lot of sense. Larger schools typically requested the machines with clean images which would be promptly wiped by their staff.

No. Dell is selecting an image with Firefox installed.

And likely has PCs with this image ready to go.

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