Experiencing new, (old) computers

It's the start of a new year; so firstly, i'd like to wish everybody a happy new year, and all the best for 2011! With the new year, comes christmas. Along with some christmas gifts this year, I received some money from family, and therefore decided to treat myself to a 'netbook', one of the portable computers designed for light mobile computing.

We walked into the shop, and within 10 minutes left again, with a netbook. My first impression was great! The box was small and light, and from what I saw in the shop the netbook was perfect; fast, quiet, relyable, with extremely good battery life. This soon changed however...

I powered up the netbook, and was soon presented with the windows 7 welcome setup screens; after completing the setup, the netbook restarted and began setting up all it's hardware and software. 20 minutes later, the netbook restarted again, presenting me with the desktop. It was from here the entire experience went down hill. The netbook came preloaded with so much pre-installed software, it made the machine very unusable. I should point out here, this netbook included the standard netbook specifications; 1.66 GHZ attum N450, 1 GB ddr2 667MHZ ram, and a 250GB sata harddrive. Unfortunately, due to the huge amount of preinstalled software, this specification just couldn't handle the load. With windows 7 starter, a certain anti-virus software, a huge number of games, and lots of titles from the manufactorer, it was no wonder this little netbook couldn't handle the load. At times, the laptop would slow right down, to the point where the mouse pointer would freze and jump around on the screen. After removing all the pre-installed software, the netbook didn't perform much better; probably due to the left-overs from the software. It was very disappointing; the computer itself was excelent, but ruined by the software, defeating the purpose of having a mobile computer.

So, a note to netbook manufacturers: Cut down on the pre-installed software! If you must bundle too many useless software titles on your computers, supply us with a installation dvd for windows , along with the necessary drivers.