OEM "Trialware"
Are you tired of all of the "trialware" that gets installed on your maching from the OEM? Have you ever fired up your new machine and think "Sweet! This thing comes with Office" or "Its nice they installed Norton for me" and then wonder why it your locked out of it 60 days later? You could look at it that the OEM is making an effort to make the device more affordable up front, or you could look at it as just another way the OEM to make another buck from you. Either way, the OEM does get a kickback either for having the software installed out-of-the-box or when the user purchases an upgrade to the full version or a better version of what is installed.
OEMs have been doing this for years, and users have been complaining about it for years. Some people just live with it, maybe uninstall it if they don't use it. Some users go as far as purchasing a retail copy of the OS and ditch the original installed OS and software entirely. At least one manfucture has made steps to make a difference about this.
In the event of system corruption, virul/malware infection, etc, you can use the Recovery Manager to restore the computer back to the original factory configuration (format c:, reinstall OS, reinstall drivers and software from an image stored on the hard drive). HP has now included a "Minimized image recovery" option in their recovery software. This option allow the user to reinstall the OS and drivers, but will not include the extral trial software, popup ads, or shortcuts to 3rd party software.
A user did a comparison of the different recovery options with an HP tm2 tablet notebook and it resulted in a very impressive difference. (Click Here)
Is this something that will soon be an indurtry standard, or will this be something that will soon pass? Honestly, I would like to see this an an option that the use will see on the first boot. It wouldn't hurt to have just a clean install of the OS and give us a list of programs that we can check off if we want it installed.