[dennisw]

But we're not in disagreement: I said Apple doesn't make cheesy entry-level crap, and clearly Compaq does. It might be instructive to consider why the Compaq costs as little as it does. First, your friend will find it absolutely festooned, stuffed to the gills, with "trialware" and "bonusware" and other form of performance-sapping, pop-up flashing, annoying intrusive insecure crap, crap that natters the user to spend money to make the annoyance go away. Compaq gets a subsidy for putting each of those gems on it. So your first job, as the friend who's gotten sucked into supporting this piece of junk, is to cleanse the machine of as much of that stuff as you can find. Oh, but some won't pop its little head up for a few weeks yet. So I hope your friend lives close by, because it'll be a while before you're done with that part of the fun. The best part is how you can show him how easy it is to reboot Windows, which you'll have to do a dozen times. Enjoy.

Your second job will be to download and install a decent anti-virus/anti-malware program (unless you succumb to the siren call and hourly pop-up come-ons from the trialware, which will ask you to pay). Gotta be sure the machine is locked-down. Be sure to teach your friend about malware and email attachments and so forth. Enjoy.

Hope you feel better after all that holier than thou venting
Now back to the real world
I will take off any trial-ware.....20 minutes time
Run msconfig and eliminate unneeded programs that start in the background when booting up
I will install Avira free anti-virus, make sure Windows Defender and Windows Firewall are turned on along with automatic updates
I will see if restore disks are included. If not we will burn the restore DVDs..... takes one hour

It takes me 80 minutes to get the new computer prepped and up and running and my friend saves about $400 by not buying an over hyped Apple product that does more than he needs
That's a good deal where I come from

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"Hope you feel better after all that holier than thou venting"

Every example I cited was from sore personal experience.

Say hi to Mujibur for me.

[antiRepublicrat]

It takes me 80 minutes to get the new computer prepped and up and running and my friend saves about $400

Now imagine your friend didn't have you, was paying Best Buy or some other outfit to do it, at $$$ per hour, go slow to earn more $$$.

An iMac, once out of the box, takes probably less than 10 minutes to get running and on the Internet (I'll even add that it be wireles with WPA2 encryption, but using DHCP and broadcasting SSID) for the average person, with no expert help.