Today was my nieces 13th birthday. Because she is growing up and almost in high school my dad/her grandpa, bought her a compaq laptop. Now, being the nice geek uncle I am, I told her I would help set it up for her. And by setup, I mean:
- Install FireFox 3
- Delete all Internet Explorer shortcuts
- Install AVG
- Uninstall Norton Antivirus 60day trial version
- Stop all programs from launching when Windows starts up
- Install Windows Updates
- Install Adaware
- Run Adware
- Make recovery discs
Wait, wtf? Make recovery discs? Yes. I had to make recovery discs because the box didn’t come with one. Instead it came with this paper:
My first thought after reading this was, “Since when did this type of thing started happening?” Then I thought, “This isn’t a good feature at all. What if the hard drive completely dies?” You wouldn’t be able to do a full recovery when you put in a new hard drive. Or would you? So, just to make sure, I created those recovery discs. What surprised me was that it took 2 DVDs and 2 hours to create them.
It was no big deal to me. I just kept playing Street Fighter 4 on Xbox Live while the recovery discs were created. But all these procedures to get a PC laptop running out of the box and smoothly completely made me hate Windows even more and OS X less.
Out of the box, OS X takes less than 30 minutes to setup. That’s even with the software updates.
