Pitying the poor consumer

Earlier this week I was asked to look at a brand new Compaq "delivered to you by HP"(???) C773EA laptop that a friend had bought from PC World for a very reasonable £399. He asked me to investigate why it was "running so slow", something I found quite surprising for such a new machine.

Headline specs are Intel Core 2 Duo T5550 1.83GHz, 2GB RAM, 120GB HDD, 15.4" BrightView screen and Vista Home Premium. For me, the only things missing are a serial port and Bluetooth, both of which could easily be remedied by USB adaptors. A more than reasonable hardware platform that reports a respectable Windows Experience Index of 3.5 (only brought down from 4.5 by the graphics adapter, no surprise on a laptop at this price point). So why should it seem to be so slow?

Looking at Task Manager revealed the answer. Compaq/HP had preloaded this consumer machine with so many auto-starting wizards and software packages that the boot time to reach a usable desktop was in excess of five minutes. Removing AIM6, AOL Toolbar 5.0, EA Link, My HP Games, The Sims Life Stories and a whole host of other HP rubbish immediately restored the machine to the expected snappy performer.

As the machine appeared to have been manufactured in April I was hopeful it would be reasonably up to date and that it might have SP1 already installed. Alas this was not the case. The good citizen in me insisted that the machine should be returned in a fully up to date condition (meaning I know how bad my friend was at updating his last XP laptop).

Running Windows Update revealed I needed to install 30 updates totalling 79.8MB. Although there are no prerequisites for SP1 I wondered if it would show up after these were installed so I went ahead, slowly "configuring updates..." on the way down and on the way back up, without any problem. I ran Windows Update again but still no SP1 was advertised. On the Microsoft website is the answer - "Windows Update will download SP1 when it's available for your PC. (It could take a month or more before SP1 shows up on your PC, so please be patient.)". Wait a month? Not likely!

I ran Windows Update once more and installed a further 4 optional updates of 15.8MB before downloading and running the "five language" standalone package. True to Microsoft's warning, it did take "approximately one hour" for the service pack to apply and again this proceeded with no problems. A final pass installed a further 2 updates of 29.4MB and now all seems good.

The hardware is a pretty good package for the road, not too heavy and it has a built-in webcam that is missing from my business HP laptops. I think I'll have one for myself and force myself to use Vista in production, rather than just in my test environment that is currently the case.