A reader writes in to report that when he bought a new laptop direct from Toshiba in November, he triggered a blue screen of death as he was uninstalling the always-useful bloatware that came pre-loaded. He called a Service Rep, got the usual “reinstall everything” run-around, and then finally got escalated to a level-two tech, which is when things got ridiculous.
the techs put me through to a level-two tech who, and I quote verbatim (because I asked him to repeat the line to me multiple times) accused me of “breaking my computer by attempting to uninstall bloatware.” I said, “do you even know what bloatware is,” and he said “yes, and it may be your fault that your computer is broken because you tried to uninstall it.” I asked if I was supposed to check with Toshiba every time I added or removed a program from my computer. He had no answer for that.
This wasn’t the only bad experience the reader reported. Toshiba also refused to price-match the laptop to their Black Friday discount, because the discount was “we’ll pay your sales tax” and, according to the CSR who promised the original price-matching, it isn’t technically a price reduction.
Oh, and after the bloatware incident, Toshiba sent our reader a new hard drive—to the wrong address. And they “forgot” to schedule a tech to come install it.
Toshiba does not sound like a good direct-sales destination.
(Thanks to W.!)
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Sony Vaio has a ton of bloatware.
If at at all possible, buy from Dell’s small business section – those don’t come with any spurious software at all.
Gateway includes a Vista Disk that’s pure, with nothing but Vista on it. I had to use it when i decided to switch from KDE linux back to Vista on my convertable tablet. Linux + non-Wacom tablet = eeeehhh…
Granted, It didn’t have drivers for anything either, but on of the things i really LIKE about vista is that drivers pretty much install themselves. You just gotta go into the device manager and it takes care of it.
The only thing that was interesting was finding a driver for the x1400 video card. Evidentally, AMD/Ati doesn’t support their own card…
@Ausoleil:
What “challenges” are these and, more importantly, why are they the fault of Microsoft?
All of the hardware issues I’ve seen have been due to lazy hardware developers who don’t want to produce new drivers.
All of the software issues I’ve seen have been due to either ancient software or a lack of support on behalf of the developer.
I notice that no one blames Apple for not being able to use OS3-OS9 software on OSX, as I mentioned earlier.
@Buran: Nothing, just the people whose response to anything, ever, involving Windows is “BUY A MAC” or “USE LINUX”.
It’s so easy. Just do a clean install and format all the garbage out.
I’ll second everyone when it comes to Norton. Used Windows uninstall to remove the program from my laptop only to discover that the machine was still booting slowly. A search in Taskmanager showed that there were several Norton programs and processes still running on the machine. In doing some research discovered that you need Norton’s own removal tool, found here: [service1.symantec.com]
I unfortunately didn’t use it but hunted down the processes myself. My laptop now won’t hibernate or sleep.
@quail:
The removal tool may still work in your case, if you haven’t tried it. You can also reinstall the trial and promptly remove it with the tool.
In my experience, a lot of bloatware is loaded but not activated until the user starts it up. Some can’t be deleted – Movie Maker (I consider it bloatware) comes to mind – but if you don’t activate it, it won’t bother you. Others can be deleted through Add/Remove Programs. I’ve had plenty of HP/Compaq techs who warn me not to start up Norton’s trialware – as if. I detest Norton. It has caused more damage and done more mischief on my systems than any Trojan or virus, which pests I have managed to avoid without Symantec’s help. I wouldn’t recommend this to a novice, but I’m sure many bloatware apps that haven’t been activated can simply be deleted from the Program Files folder, if they don’t appear in the Add/Remove Programs list because they haven’t actually been installed. But it’s important to remember when you get a new computer, don’t say “yes” to installing anything until you are sure you want it activated/enabled.
God I love my Mac (and the fact that I dont have to deal with crappy PC issues like this).
I just bought a Compaq laptop ad don’t like Vista. Will there be issues if I wipe out the hard drive and install windows XP?
Except for a few Norton files related to your norton account, downloading and running the “Norton removal tool” from symantec will remove all symantec products and registry items. I’ve done that prior to every Norton install…always with good results.
As for Toshiba, they really are the worst about bloatware. One approach is to buy a computer with highly standardized hardware (Intel motherboard, Intel-made internal wireless, Intel/ATI/nvidia graphics) then get your drivers from Intel et al. No broadcom or atheros wireless — their chips are fine, but inevitably the drivers must come from the PC maker (often the case with atheros wifi), and then you are at their mercy.
I have never had an issue with drivers downloaded from Intel.
Heh,heh. That’ll learn you!
I bought a Toshiba laptop in May of this year. There was nothing I could to to get Toshiba to NOT equip the machine with Vista, so I took the least expensive route an got it with Vista Home Basic.
The machine arrived in a few days. After unpacking and making sure all the parts were there, I placed an Ubuntu 7.04 Desktop CD in the CD reader and booted it up. I clicked the install and wrote a new partition table, partitioned it to my liking and installed Ubuntu Linux.
All was not perfect, however. I had to do a little tweaking to get the screen resolution right but that was it. It just worked outta the box. No phone home to check in with BigBrotherBill. … Do you think what-his-name will throw a chair at me? … nevermind … No add-on anti-virus software to contend with, and pay for. No optional at extra cost brain-dead bloatware to get rid of. And, best of all, a reasonably secure platform on which I can run software.
This household is a “Windows Free Environment”. Five (5) machines and not a single one of them running Windows.
You can too.
@akronharry: Probably! I had two former employers disqualify Compaq and HP (before they merged) because their hardware would not run genuine Microsoft OEM software. Last I looked, they were still on the “disqualified vendors” list. I think Dell made the list after I left.
The two employers, about 90,000 seats, between them, had a local firm build “WhiteBoxes” to order that would run Windows installed from the OEM media.
@UnnamedUser:
I… have no idea what you’re talking about!
Any machine will take a Windows install. The original hardware vendor is responsible for not producing drivers for your version of Windows, not the reseller. If Realtek or Sigmatel refuse to distribute drivers that will work on XP, that’s not HP/Compaq/Toshiba/etc’s problem (absent, of course, any strange agreements, like those made by nVidia).
I’ve had the same problem (about the blue screen popping up), no matter what I do, it still doesn’t’ work, and every time I ask Toshiba for help, they ask me to send it in, and then they reboot my system and say its fixed. Two months later, same problem reoccurs. The lesson here is, not to buy Toshiba products, the least thing they can do is exchange it, but they refuse to do so.
@Binaryslyder:
Thanks for the report. I am in the market for a new laptop, and Toshiba is one of the companies I was looking at. I expect to be able to remove bloatware from any computer I buy. (if I had my way, it would never be pre-loaded and just come on an optional CD)
Reading this, I have chosen not to buy from Toshiba. But not just because I won’t be able to remove bloatware. Or even because of the obviously poor tech support. (if you can call it that.) No, for me, the concern is that if the computer will become unstable as a result of uninstalling anything at all, then the computer is of poor construction to begin with. The quotes from tech support also raises fears that an incident like this could even void the warranty. Since most warranties don’t protect against user inflicted damage, I would imagine that if they really believed it to be the consumer’s fault, they would fight me on the warranty.
Additionally, it appears to me that, regardless of if removing a program actually caused the system crash or not, the statement that it is the consumer’s fault is irresponsible. Either way, it’s bad news. It means that a Toshiba computer will become unstable as a result of normal computer functions, and to blame the consumer for their own construction problems just puts the final nail in the casket.
So Toshiba, that’s about 2300.00 you won’t get from me.
Over the weekend Sony floated a $50 charge for giving you a clean computer rather than one loaded with system-crippling junkware — then promptly made the "service" free of charge after the outcry.
Nope toshiba doesn’t sound that good. I’m also sure there are many comments (didn’t read them all) that bash all of tech support.
Kill all bloatware. Every bit of it. Uninstall everything you can find that you won’t use. Best method. http://www.windowsreinstall.com and reinstall Windows -all other software. It’s a bit more work and if you read some forums you will get it all up and running probably faster than before.