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.