Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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Last week my parents were visiting. And like a good son, I spent a few hours getting my dad set up on his new Sony S Series Laptop to replace his Fujitsu Tablet (my Dad was jealous by all the Apple PowerBooks his friends have and he wanted a sexy wide screen laptop that didn't weigh 50lbs). The laptop is awesome, thinking of one for myself. However... I counted > 30 items preinstalled in the Add/Remove programs. I spent most of this time just removing all this nonsense. Things have actually gotten worse over the past few years. In terms of bad offenders I'd rank:
With a Fujitsu or a Dell you barely get anything installed, which is great. Toshiba/Sony laptops come with dozens of utilities, processes, crap I don't want or need. Who thinks this is a good idea? Do I really need a process running for every hotkey and widget? Do I really need AOL, RealPlayer, and every AntiSpyware, Virus, Trojan Horse protector, 2 Wifi thingies, and Media Home Server sharing software? 25 icons on my desktop?
To make matters worse, Sony did not include any software to restore the laptop to factory state. Nada. Good thing I can boot XP from a CD on that thing... at least they dumped the Jog Dial.