Solved! When you buy a Windows laptop

[nbartolo7]

and you turn it on, is it turning on as if it had just booted from a USB device containing the windows media installation tool?

Meaning, is it really brand-new? Since most come with bloatware, I don't really know. Wouldn't it be better to format them, to be sure they come as clean as possible, or will the manufacturer's bloatware never go away?

Another way of saying this is, does a laptop with windows OS pre-installed (as most do) is it as clean as a laptop that is bought without an OS?

 

[Wolfshadw]

No. Laptops will always come with some sort of customized software installed and with tweaks to the OS for that specific laptop (custom drivers, etc...).

-Wolf sends

 

[nbartolo7]

No. Laptops will always come with some sort of customized software installed and with tweaks to the OS for that specific laptop (custom drivers, etc...).

-Wolf sends

Ok. And how do manufacturer's achieve that? They program it into the BIOS directly?

 

[USAFRet]

Take it out of the box
Power it up
Get it running and activated.

After....
Clean install, wiping all what used to be there.

Laptops generally come with a bunch of manufacturer junk you don't want or need.

 

[Wolfshadw]

Ok. And how do manufacturer's achieve that? They program it into the BIOS directly?

There is a process called slipstreaming that allows you to add content (drivers and such) to the OS install. Once you have the OS set up the way it needs to be for that particular model of laptop (custom and free trial software), an image is created and that image is installed onto the devices.

-Wolf sends

 

[AlHuneke]

I always do a clean install after I fire up a new machine. You still may need to go to the vendors site to download specific drivers and there is may be vendor software that is useful to have. It takes some time to figure this all out. Whether it's worth it is up to you. One quick thing you can do with a new machine is to go to the apps settting and delete the obvious junk like trial software.

 

[USAFRet]

A few years ago, a friend of mine bought a new laptop, low to mid level performance.
After a day or two, she brought it to me, complaining of "slow".

I cranked it up, and "slow" was not the word I would have used.
Rather...unusable.

2 or 3 preinstalled scanning and fixing applications, stepping all over each other on start up.
The thing was literally unusable for an hour while these idiot applications did whatever it was they were doing.
And, a brand new system..."We found 18 problems!"

Wipe and reinstall of a bare OS...literally like a whole different system.
Worked like a dream.