I had to do a lot of uninstalling, because it shipped chock-full of software, virtually none of which I cared about. If you were a new home user, it would've been a good bundle, with MS Works/Money/Encarta, Norton Antivirus, and a pile of games, but I just took 'em all off in favor of installing MS Office and AutoCAD Land Development Desktop. AutoCAD runs very nicely on it, which is gonna be its primary purpose.
Only other complaint is that 5 gig of the hard drive is dedicated to a DOS partition (drive D:) that has a compressed version of the original drive C: on it (for new users who manage to completely screw up their files, I presume). I'll probably go to CompUSA today and invest in one of those non-destructive re-partition tools so I can give that space back to drive C:. Given that just one of Shelly's subdivisions can take up 200 meg in a single file, we're gonna need the extra space :)
Only have two complaints:
1) The only CD that came with it was for MS Money 2002. Everything else is in that second partition. I would've much preferred to get Windows XP Home on CD. I do have all of the XP serial numbers and such though, which are lovingly tattooed on the top of the case. I'll have to some hunting, though, if I manage to screw up XP at all.
2) I opted for the cheapest keyboard and mouse bundle, as I'm picky about keyboards and mice, and I figured I wouldn't like either of 'em. I was right. The mouse is just a generic-type mouse that you can get for about $10 everywhere now, but the keyboard seems especially small and flimsy. I'm probably just projecting, though, as I'm used to my Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro, which is about the size of a Yugo.
...which brings me to an entirely unrelated complaint. Microsoft has now dropped the layout of their Natural Keyboard Pro in favor of this layout that has a nice two-tone paint job but mushes up the navigation keys into a completely unfamiliar layout.
