Craputer?

A crap computer. The term “craputer” has been coined to describe the onslaught of cut-every-corner, coddle-the-user, manufacturer-knows-best, pre-loaded-full-of-crap consumer-grade PCs made by eMachines, Compaq and others. Some earmarks of the “craputer” include:

* Sponsored icons and Internet links on the desktop, Free Demos and Special Offers popping up at random, one-touch “shopping” buttons on the keyboard, and other factory pre-loaded marketing crap
* Lack of a genuine Operating System installation disc or driver diskettes. Craputers often come with a set of “Recovery Diskettes” which, if used, will format your hard drive and restore your system to exactly how it was when you got it (in other words, re-load all the craputer components, regardless of how hard you’ve worked to get rid of them)
* Slow boot-ups and sluggish system performance; system memory exhausted by the large number of unnecessary background programs (media players, task schedulers, registration reminder nags, background tasks with cryptic names and unknown purposes) loading on start-up. Is the space next to your system clock overrun with little icons? Is the Ctrl-Alt-Delete task list full, even when you close all programs and have “nothing running”?
* Cut corners everywhere (cheapo components and missing PC Speakers, reset buttons, case fans, audio cables…)
* Opening the Web Browser brings up, instead of Internet sites, an advertisement nag for the manufacturer’s Partner ISP, that you can’t get rid of; Won’t let you set it up to use your existing Internet account
* Power or Reset button that doesn’t work, Malfunctioning Sleep Mode, and/or “helpful” power-management features that won’t take no for an answer
* Several Gigabytes of your hard disk taken up by a “Recovery Partition” (SYSTEM_SAV) or other useless data
* Craputer maker’s logo displayed during boot-up, covering up any boot-up messages that might alert you to problems or help troubleshoot your system
* Can’t get into the CMOS setup to view or change settings (see previous)

http://cexx.org/craputer.htm