For consulting I decided that I really should have a working Microsoft Office workstation, so I bought a Dell Dimension 3000 with WinXP Pro and Office SBE for just under $1000. (At retail, XP Pro and SBE would cost $710, so I figured I'd spend the extra $250 and get a rather nice PC to run it on.) I ordered seven days ago, Dell shipped it the next day, and I received it today on the third delivery attempt.

Having not owned a Windows system for almost four years, I was rather surprised at the amount of hassle it takes to get an out-of-the-box PC up and running. I can understand having to update the virus database, install a couple patches to Windows, etc (although the drive was imaged at the factory a week ago) and I can even tolerate "Windows Product Activation", but just to get the preinstalled copies of XP, Office, and McAfee running, I was not expecting:

• Clicking "I Agree" on eight different EULAs, not counting Dell's infamous "Press any key to indicate acceptance of all EULAs for all software preinstalled on this system" screen that pops up two seconds after the first boot.
• Seven required reboots, two of which occurred after nothing obvious had happened.
• A 23-meg "critical update" for XP.
• Harassment from Windows Security Manager (whatever that is) every time I boot because I have set Windows Update to only notify me when updates are available, but not to download and install them automatically.
• Harassment from "Dell Support", telling me it wants to upload "anonymous usage statistics". No, there's no way to turn it off. The only relevant option lets you toggle between asking before sending statistics or simply sending statistics without notifying you at all.
• Having to open the help browser to figure out how to update my McAfee virus definitions, even though the McAfee control panel popped up on every boot to alert me that my definitions were out-of-date.
• Language settings in all my Office applications default to "Chinese (Taiwan)". (I'm pretty sure Dell ships legal software...)
• And, of course, having fifty different preinstalled apps that I didn't ask for, telling me to sign up for music downloads, dialup Internet access, etc.

Honestly, how do people put up with this nonsense? Suffering through all this crap makes setting up Gentoo look easy!