Went round to my good mate John F’s yesterday to set-up his new PC. Now one piece of kit that I always pack is PC Decrappifier. It’s a fact of life that if you buy a PC these days you will get some crap installed on their by default. Now I’ve had no experience of Zoostorm before so I assumed the worst. John bought a i5-2310 with 6gb ram, 500GB HDD in a small tower case, inc Win7 Home Premium 64-bit.
Firstly Zoostorm seem to use standard PC parts, Asus motherboard inc original manual and driver disk, bog standard cheapy PC case, normal included 300watt PSU kind of what you would build yourself on a tight budget. Even the pre-installed version of Windows is very low on crapware or rather things I would have installed anyway:
- Windows Live Essentials (saved me installing it)
- Office 2010 trial (just needed us to punch in the code from the boxed copy he bought)
- Windows Security Essentials (another saved install)
- Adobe Reader (would have installed Nitro or Foxit, but really it does the job)
- Zuuteam online support (aside from some OEM logos in My Computer/properties this is the only branding I could see)
- ONLY CRAPPWARE I FOUND: Bing Toolbar, easy to disable
My sim free phone came with more crapware. Zoostorm even go one better, they sell OSless PCs, perfect if you have a corporate image or you want to use a Linux Distro and want to save the Windows tax.
The PC was cheap (£400), but the kettle socket on the PSU had too long central pin, meaning that the cable must not be nudged or the PC switches off. Other flaw is that if you open the ports panel on the front and flick it shut, it presses the DVD drive eject button.
Really though this is the least painful new PC setup I have done in years and the standard case bodes well. The 300w PSU won’t have the juice for a graphics card, but aside from that I was happily suprised.