Maybe not a new machine, but how hard is it to immediately wipe to a clean installation? "Windows" doesn't come with the "gigs worth of crap", the machines typically sold with Windows preloaded do.
My HP laptop had no CD to do a clean install with. Only a built-in partition with an image on it, already pre-loaded with their crapware. And when I go in install/uninstall programs and try to get rid of it, a few uninstallers give me errors, and the other crap won't uninstall if I don't get rid of them first! I can't understand by what reasoning they arrived to the conclusion that paying a team of programmers to implement this kind of crap was a good idea. There's a password manager which works when it feels like it, plenty of useless tray icons for things such as keyboard shortcuts that never worked, an anti-virus trial, a couple firewalls (the Windows one isn't sufficient, apparently), auto-update for the HP utilities, and the rest I don't even remember because it was just too useless. And it all loaded when the machine booted, yay!
Sorry for the venting, I spent quite a few hours to get this machine to a usable state, and even now there's some leftovers that I just can't remove without a fresh, clean, pirated copy of Windows. It's frustrating.
I have one of those, too. Vista SP2 won't install. I seldom use that side of the machine, though... these HPs play nicely with Fedora out of the box. (pavilion dv)
