• Listen to a special audio message from Bill Roper to the Hive Workshop community (Bill is a former Vice President of Blizzard Entertainment, Producer, Designer, Musician, Voice Actor) 🔗Click here to hear his message!
  • Read Evilhog's interview with Gregory Alper, the original composer of the music for WarCraft: Orcs & Humans 🔗Click here to read the full interview.

Why I hate OEMs and nVidia

Status
Not open for further replies.
Level 11
Joined
Feb 18, 2004
Messages
394
I'm here to tell a story. A story of torment, hatred, and eternal suffering. The story of buying an OEM computer.

Last christmas, I wanted a new computer. More accurately, I needed one, as my then-current computer was around 5 years old with 2 year old upgrades. (The upgrades being year-old technology when i got them.) All the local places i used to buy computer parts / packages had closed. So i decided to get an OEM machine. Shoping around, I settled on an 800$ HP machine.

I got the machine, set it up, stuck in an additional HDD i had with only minor phisical instalation issues. I load it up, remembering hearing horror storys of the crap they include pre-installed... Nothing prepares you for what you face, the first time you face a "fresh" windows install with 3 years worth of trial software and all that crap loaded in to it. So I check to see how hard it would be to reinstall windows. Nothing prepares you for the rage you get when you learn they no longer give you windows CDs, or really, any way to actually install windows.

Instead of allowing you to reinstall windows, they provide a "Recovery Partition" on your HDD, a good 9 GB in size. This allows you to format and reimage your whole disk, brining all the crapware the computer came with. And if that was not bad enogh, they do not even provide any form of bootable CD / DVD. Instead, you must order them explicitly from HP, or burn your own from the data on the recovery partition. I cannot stress this enogh:
14 mother-fucking CDs to burn a set of recovery disks. There is so much trialware and crap loaded in to the OS, that it takes 14 mother fucking CDs to hold it all. Of course, you can also use 3 DVD-+Rs instead of 14 CDs, but the true kicker to this is yet to come.

So, stepping back, a brand new HP computer, filled to the breaking point with crapware. Over the first few months, i worked at uninstalling and cleaning up as much of it as i could, while also trying to use and configure my computer. Eventually i got most of it cleaned up, with scars nestled all over from the massive surgery i had done in removing so much cancer from my OS. All was OK for a while.

I started loading up games on to my computer after getting rid of the majority of the crapware. Nice, fun games. Turns out HP thoght it would be a lark to ship the computer with old drivers that had a rather common (every few hours or so) bluescreen issue when running DirectX heavy applications. So i go and grab the latest drivers, install, and reboot. Bluescreen! Big, fat, ugly bluescreen! Boot in to "Last known good configuration", try again a good 5 times to the same result: A bluescreen during booting!

So i contact HP tech support via email, detailing my problem with a rather detailed explination. An oversimplified version of my email and their response follows:
"You gave me drivers that bluescreen! and updating them to newer drivers cause a bluescreen on boot! fix it please!"
"Here is a link to a tutorial on how to update your graphics card drivers:"

Thats right. HP esentally told me to kill myself. (Or at least, as close as you can get in the world of computing. "Go bluescreen yourself, emo!") I try their live support. After multiple redirects to other people and absolutely nothing accomplished, i give up.

I live with it. "I'll just save often"... all was fine. ... for a while.

Windows is windows, and a user like me is admittedly hard on the pile of shit. Many installs and uninstalls, many changes and tweaks to the system, much heavy use. Over time, windows just has a tendency to die. Slowly. Eventually, my task manager was broken, nVidia drivers where still causing random bluescreens, and any further attempts to get help from HP support where met with similar results. So i start backing up and planning to just bite the bullet and reimage from the recovery disks i burned.

About a week ago now, i installed Fable: The lost chapters. Bluescreens every hour, sometimes more. I saved after every screen load, and just played... i was happy playing, liked the game, and wanted to play it, bluescreens or not. And then, after a bluescreen which cost me a good 10 minutes of game progression, windows didn't boot. It hung on the boot loading screen, and would not progress. I waited an hour for a 2 minute process.

That was not the begining of the end. That was the end. Debug mode told me my registry hives where corrupt. Attempting safemode was useless, of course, but a desperation move. I wasn't ready! i hadn't finished backing up! Not now!! I wanna play fable!... ... quoth the computer: "Kernel will not load".

A ubunut live CD running at 800*600 was all i had to work off of for days. Backing up, searching in a last ditch attempt for a way to get a clean windows install... And i found it. I found a set of Windows XP MCE 2005 OEM disk ISOs!!! Burned to disk, finished all the backing up i could think to do, and booted to disk 1... of 3.

Thats right. Lets compare:
Windows XP MCE 2005 OEM version disks: 900 MB
HP Recovery Partition / Disks: 9 GB

That was how much shit HP jammed in to the OS. They crammed over 8 GB of shit (Pre-install size!) in to MCE 2005. 11 extra CDs. And please do remember, thats 8 GB of mostly simplistic and small programs. Less than 1 GB of drivers. (much less.) I can not stress that enogh: Over 8 GB of SHIT.

I get windows installed with a few hikcups, find the drivers in my mess of backups, and get most things working very nicely. Then the ethernet controller dies out, after working just fine, and will not establish a connection for love nor money. A reinstall of windows did not fix it. a good 4-6 hours later, and i found the "problem" (or more like, a solution.). limiting the throghput speed to 10 Mb/s fixed it. Not too big a deal. Except for the fact that it worked just fine before on higher speeds.

And here i am. Now lets all hope im not headed towards another failure. Because windows died... Not two weeks after the warrenty expired! (i shit you not.)

Side note: I'm fully willing to admit i priated the disks for an OS I legally own. (Or rather, had to pirate to avoid 8 Gigs of crap) Considering it passes windows authentication and works fine with Windows Genuine Advantage using naught but the factory-stuck-on windows key on the side of my computer, I've stolen nothing.

The moral of the story:
NEVER BUY AN OEM PC. ESPECIALLY AN HP.

The computer is personal again! :D .... If this is a personal computer, i want the non-personal kind back.
 
Level 15
Joined
Nov 1, 2004
Messages
1,058
IMHO, OEMs generally suck. I've had to call tech support many times before and I feel your pain...the "recovery" partitions, the endless load of worthless preloaded software, the lack of reinstallation discs.

That said, if you DO pick an OEM, Dell as about the least-bad OEM these days. They have been a lot worse in the past, but now:
  • Their cases (mostly) are much more standard ATX/BTX cases with standard internals. They are much easier to open, much easier to upgrade and install hardware into them.
  • They have better cooling now. Not one 80mm fan for the whole computer anymore. Most of them come with at least 2 fans (120mm + 80mm) plus the PSU fan.
  • They come with actual Windows XP reinstallation discs. In fact, the past 5 Dells I've worked on had XP discs that didn't ask for activation. Whether it activated automatically or not, I do not know, but I was able to resintall, punch in the product key, and there you have it.
  • Finally, on their small business computers (almost identical to the home versions), you can still choose XP (instead of Vista) and they give you customization options to NOT install much of the extra programs. When you open the box, you actually get a plain desktop with maybe only Google Desktop/Toolbar and the standard Dell support program...that's it.

Anyway, even for all this improvement, I still recommend custom building your own machine (unless you want to get a laptop).

Hopefully you can get all the current computer problems all squared away. :smile:
 
Level 14
Joined
Nov 25, 2004
Messages
1,185
my brother had a similar story 2 weeks ago...

he bought Lenovo notebook with geforce go7300 graphics card. ok, i take the notebook back home (bro was working atm), run it... after 5 minutes, it loaded windows vista with 2 year trial of Microsoft Office 2003. ok.

crysis was working a bit shitty, 10 fps, hard to play, and freezing every few seconds.

ok, me and my bro decide to install windows xp.

we ran ubuntu from the live cd and wtf hidden partition with vista recovery and stuff

ok, we killed the partition, formatted both main and extended one.

put the windows xp cd in, restarted comp, "Windows XP installer cannot detect a hard drive. please make sure you connected it blahblahblah". After 2 hours of messing with it, we found an option in CMOS, which made disk seeable. we installed xp.

of course, drivers didn't work, manufacturer's site doesn't really help as most of the drivers are for Vista. It took us around 5 hours to configure most things and install it so it "works". Crysis is pretty playable with 20 fps, only problems occur in Stalker - transparency isn't working etc.

NVidia doesn't really support this gfx card, notebook manufacturer doesn't support it either. We had to hack the .inf files to make the drivers at least INSTALL ("sorry, no proper gfx card detected. nvidia driver installation cannot continue").

so, after all, kinda similar story - poor support for notebook, shitty unneeded software on a hidden partition
 
Level 11
Joined
Feb 18, 2004
Messages
394
My problems cease to end...

This time, its microsofts fault! :D

I have two hard disks, partitioned as such:
Master:
D: Windows
K: HP's stupid recovery partition
Slave:
C: Reserved for linux
[3 other partitions]

When i installed windows, it chose to locate the NT boot loader... not on D:, like one would expect it to! oh no, it chose to locate it directly on the mostly full C:! (Formated NTFS right now, but i WAS going to eventually format it for linux!) Thats right! :D It chose, for whatever god damn reason, to not use the freshly formated and fully ready for windows D: partition! oh no! it had to go and FUCK ME OVER YET AGAIN and stuff the fucking boot loader on C:! Why did it do this? Did i tell it to? no. Did i ask it to? no. Did it ask for god damn permission to put the fucking boot loader on that partition? of course not!

And now, because my computer is an OEM, i'm unable to even send an angry fucking letter to MS as far as i can see, as all of their support costs money! 60 mother fucking $ for a phone call to tech support for something they want 200$ to buy in the first place!!!

Earth-Fury's List of Places to Fire-Bomb When He Finally Snaps:
  1. HP Offices around the globe
  2. Microsoft offices around the globe
  3. Dell offices, just to make sure other OEMs get the fucking message
  4. Every single IE developers home and current place of work

Note to the FBI: Its a joke. Kind of. *twitch*
 
Level 15
Joined
Nov 1, 2004
Messages
1,058
Unfortunately, Windows takes a lot of liberty always installing the boot loader in the MBR of the main disk. (Linux is nice and lets you choose where to install GRUB/LILO)

That said, here are some suggestions:

Idea #1
Load windows normally (you should be able to choose the partition where the windows files will reside), and let the NT boot loader install to the MBR. Then install Linux after (to its own partition), and let it install GRUB over the NT boot loader.

Idea #2
Load Windows first, as described in the previous section. Install Linux to the alternate partition, but DON'T install GRUB to the MBR. Instead force GRUB to install to the boot record of your Linux /boot partition. You can then use the NT boot loader to call the GRUB bootstrap and boot Linux (it's very nifty, actually :smile: ) Ask me (or search google) if you want instructions on doing this; I would be glad to help.

In both cases, your partition table should look something like this:
Partition 1 = Windows C:
Partition 2 = Linux /boot
Partition 3 = Extended
Partition 4 = Extended/Linux Swap
Partition 5 = Extended/Linux root
Partition 6 and on = Extended, extra windows and linux partitions

It is IMPORTANT that your windows install and your Linux /boot are both Primary partitions. They cannot be contained within the Extended partition, at least based on personal experience. (I may be wrong on this though)

That said, if you need to do any partition copying/resizing/sliding/editing, feel free to grab BootItNG. It says 30 days trial, but when I've used it in the past, it seems to run indefinitely. I have an older trial version that seems to be an unlimited trial and I can send it your way if you want.
 
Level 36
Joined
Jul 1, 2007
Messages
6,677
I received recently an Alienware Area-51 v9950 (or something like that) for xmas, I love it! No extra crap, actually came with so little that I had to go out and buy microsoft office and antivirus software, but that didn't bother me too much. 600g hard drive capability FTW.
 
Level 21
Joined
Jan 5, 2005
Messages
3,515
yeh but alienware, lan pirates and companies like that make their pcs for games and they arent stupid. not only that but they arent gunna waste money making crap software which isnt wanted.

for OEM computers by dell and hp and companies like this, the added software can be "marketed" as a bonus feature to sell more to customers i.e. "buy this HP computer and get free HP photo suite!!!". pc gamers dont want all this shit, so companies that make pcs for games dont waste money making pointless software.
 
Level 36
Joined
Mar 15, 2006
Messages
7,945
You know, I have two HP Laptops, and I couldn't be more pleased. The Recovery Disk thing is a pain in the ass, but the way it works out for me is only 2 DVD's, which isn't really that bad if you ask me. The thing is, you got an OEM rig for 800 that would probably be an assload more money if not OEM, so how do they recoup the loss? By loading it full of trialware to serve as advertising of course. Both of my laptops only had 4 links, ebay, internet services, and a couple others, and no preinstalled software, just links. It was actually really nice.

But i'm still glad I built my PC from the ground up....
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top