I just bought a Lenovo Ideapad from Costco for about $500. The last time I bought a computer preloaded with Windows was about a decade ago. My experience so far:
I turn it on, there's a license agreement. Actually, there's two. One is from Microsoft, and it's rather long but I guess it's about par for the course.
Then there's the Lenovo license agreement, which is actually a bunch of other license agreements concatenated together, for services I might or might not even want. I don't know how long it is, but I began to suspect it might be tied with the Old Testament. Which you're theoretically supposed to read in a tiny box and agree to, but if anyone were to actually attempt to read every word they'd better clear their calendar for maybe the next couple weeks.
Next Windows wanted me to sign up for a Microsoft account. There's no obvious way around it, but fortunately a bit of googling directed me to a workaround that lets you create just a local account by disabling the network interface at the right time.
When I finally boot the machine up, the default wallpaper is a Red Bull ad.
I've had similar experiences buying a Roku (sorry, we won't let you use this device or access an account you already pay for separately unless you provide your credit card and tell us, for some reason, whether or not you have a penis) and a Samsung tablet (to use this device, you must agree that you have no privacy whatsoever). The people running these companies seem incapable of feeling shame.
I guess I'll crawl back into my cave and keep using Linux for the foreseeable future.
I turn it on, there's a license agreement. Actually, there's two. One is from Microsoft, and it's rather long but I guess it's about par for the course.
Then there's the Lenovo license agreement, which is actually a bunch of other license agreements concatenated together, for services I might or might not even want. I don't know how long it is, but I began to suspect it might be tied with the Old Testament. Which you're theoretically supposed to read in a tiny box and agree to, but if anyone were to actually attempt to read every word they'd better clear their calendar for maybe the next couple weeks.
Next Windows wanted me to sign up for a Microsoft account. There's no obvious way around it, but fortunately a bit of googling directed me to a workaround that lets you create just a local account by disabling the network interface at the right time.
When I finally boot the machine up, the default wallpaper is a Red Bull ad.
I've had similar experiences buying a Roku (sorry, we won't let you use this device or access an account you already pay for separately unless you provide your credit card and tell us, for some reason, whether or not you have a penis) and a Samsung tablet (to use this device, you must agree that you have no privacy whatsoever). The people running these companies seem incapable of feeling shame.
I guess I'll crawl back into my cave and keep using Linux for the foreseeable future.