Toshiba: Just as nasty as American PC companies

The other day, I was called over to help my friend reformat her Toshiba notebook she purchased last year. There was no Windows XP CD, but it did come with a full image of what was originally on the notebook at the time of purchase. This meant I wouldn't need to go find and install drivers, pretty nice, huh?

Well as it turns out, this image restore was a bloated version of XP filled with so much junk by Toshiba I couldn't believe it. Trial software, games no one asked for, etc. I wouldn't be surprised to see this from American computer manufacturers but a Japanese company? Seems no company can just sell a clean computer these days.

Before I loaded the image, I had attempted to do my own reformat and installation with my Windows XP CD. Wouldn't you know it, Toshiba doesn't offer all the XP drivers on its website. But if you have Vista, they have all the drivers you could want. Way to offer support to your customers, Toshiba.

Once I found this out, I decided to use the image disc that Toshiba included. Let me tell you that there is a major difference between a clean install of Windows XP and a clean install of Toshiba's disc image. The computer run very sluggish once I loaded the original image off the CDs.

It took me a long time to uninstall all the crud Toshiba threw on there. And the notebook still ran a bit sluggish. This happens with computers from Sony, Dell, HP, etc. But usually you can use the provided operating system CD/DVD and start from scratch if you like. This was not the case with Toshiba.

If there was ever a time to recommend a Mac, I'd say it is definitely now. (You Linux users stay out of this, Linux is not ready for mainstream desktops. Although I do like Ubuntu.)

There goes my rant.