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

Anyway, I reinstalled GRUB as I said I would, but only got round to doing it 6 days later, and when I finally booted back into Ubuntu, I realised just how much I'd missed Ubuntu/Linux during those last 6 days, it was a strange feeling, though it leads me to believe that I'm beginning to prefer using Linux over Windows, and my usage habit shows this as well

Still, it can only be a good thing

I'm well aware that there's many change's 'behind the scenes' which make improvements here and there. But to the end user, there's not really much difference, except the disappearance of the "Search" option on the Start Menu.

I also have service pack 1 for Office 2007 (Ultimate Edition) and I haven't really noticed anything different about that. Speaking of Office, I received my back-up disks today I only wanted them because I knew they'd be official printed disk's