As I’m sure nearly everybody who has bought a new computer, has had the torture of preinstalled (a.k.a bundled) software. Most of us will remove it, as they’re usually 30, 60 or 90 day trials of some program you probably won’t need.

Some of the worst in my experiences are:

1. AOL, it is truly terrible, though I’ve not seen it for a few years now
2. McAfee/Norton, if I want anti-virus, then I will get Anti-Virus!! [Note - I use AVG Free for my Windows machines, it works perfectly well, at no cost!]
3. Manufacturer software (I’ve noticed HP have a lot of software coming on their laptops still:()

So, with a brief history of that, here comes the details of the bundled software on the Qosmio G40 I received:

• Loads of Toshiba Apps
• Norton Internet Security 2008 Trial (90 days)

Now as I stated above, I don’t really like preinstalled software…I can cope with the manufacturer applications, in fact, they actually seem pretty useful on this laptop, as they include an HD DVD player, which for some odd reason, wouldn’t work unless I opened the app then inserted the HD DVD, more on this in a later part. Also included was the Fingerprint reading software, which allows me to log-on (and more!) using a Fingerprint, which is pretty cool.

And Norton…well…I make it no secret that I dislike Norton software, I think it slows the system down after a while, so the first thing I did (after installing Firefox) was uninstall it, re-enable the Windows firewall, and then download and install AVG Free.

That’s really all the software that came bundled with it…a couple of useful ones included to (I noticed Adobe Acrobat Reader was already installed). So that was quite good to see, I’m glad manufacturers are cutting down on the amount of software preinstalled.

Update: I have to say that I did in fact forget the most important piece of bundled software. The laptop came with Genuine Windows Vista Ultimate Though annoyingly I had to go through the process of installing all the updates