On 3/31/2014 8:37 AM, Bob_Villa wrote:
On Monday, March 31, 2014 7:38:02 AM UTC-5, trader_4 wrote:

I have two HP systems, two to three years old and have no "crapware"
problems, issues, etc with either of them. They do come with some utilities,
and Norton, but nothing that's intrusive, full of ads, or anything like that.
I'm very happy with them, liked the HP website for configuration and would
buy from them again.

....

... Dell,HP/Compaq,Acer/Gateway,Lenovo, all sell entry level
PC's...and they all come with a certain amount of "crapware" (or
limited use programs) that subsidizes the lowest price!

None of which may be of any _real_ value, but it doesn't really make any
difference, either...just delete anything you don't want (altho w/
_minimum_ enry-level systems supporting 1000 GB drives or larger one is
unlikely to ever care that a few MB are taken up. Only real issue ime
may be some things in Startup folder you'll want to remove but at least
I've seen nothing that would make me refuse to buy from a given vendor
for that reason for the advantage of the bundled deal pricing...

This machine is roughly same age as OP's (a Dell) that bought when went
out on own consulting back in '99 -- it was
decently-middle-to-upper-half at the time. I just added 2GB memory last
week to bring it to 4 total and it made a lot of difference w/ the new
release of Matlab The Mathworks offered. I've since retired from the
consulting gig so there's no incentive/justification for upgrading
otherwise so I don't see anything at all against just getting the new
drive and perhaps another GB of memory and goin' on. This also is XP
and I don't give a hoot about the "end of service life"--it's
stable-enough there's no need to change OS.

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