Recently, a friend purchased an Acer Aspire One. Great netbook to use, but I have to admit, I had a similar reaction to Seth Godin’s post:

Apparently, a computer is now not a computer, it’s an opportunity to upsell you.
First, the setup insisted (for my own safety) that I sign up for an eternal subscription to Norton. Then it defaulted (opt out) to sending me promotional emails. Then there were the dozens (at least it felt like dozens) of buttons and searches I had to endure to switch the search box from Bing to Google. And the icons on the desktop that had been paid for by various partners and the this-comes-with-that of just about everything.

One of my first steps was to install the following:

• CCleaner (to help get rid of stuff and clean the registry out)
• Panda Cloud Antivirus (free antivirus that works on the cloud, appropriate for a netbook connected 100% of the time to the Web)
• 7Zip
• Filezilla FTP client
• FSCapture for Image Captures
• The GIMP for image editing
• MalwareBytes for antimalware
• MediaCoder and XPCodecs
• OpenOffice 3.x
• PhotoStory
• SpywareBlaster
• SumatraPDF (lite alternative to Adobe PDF Reader)
• TrueCrypt for creating encrypted drives for private data
• VLC Media Player for handling everything
• WinFF for video/audio conversion

and, regrettably,

• iTunes and Quicktime

My final act is to make a file system archive (FSA) of the whole drive so that I can restore it when problems occur…and let’s face it, since it’s Windows, there will be problems.  I also had to uninstall a bunch of stuff that came with it…MS Office 2007 trial, Norton, McAfee, and a few other things. Using CCLeaner made it an easy process.

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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure