Sam, that sounds fascinating. Would you give this non-expert an idea of what kind of crap you remove from the store-bought Windows. I'm afraid that if I remove anything, the whole system would crash.
Well, I can tell you that my Toshiba Satellite 2775XDVD had something in it that tried to contact a Toshiba server every minute while it was running.. for what, I don't know and didn't care. I rebuilt the thing the same day I detected this behavior.
I bought two low-end HP Pavilions for my twin sons when they left for college two years ago, because I had a $2000 budget for two complete systems (monitors, printers, surge protectors, CDRW, Zip, etc.). Staples had a major sale which brought the Pavilions, alone, down to $750 for the pair.
But the suckers came with installation CD's which automatically install a bunch of crappy software plus the required Celeron hardware drivers. I couldn't just install my own OS, or just the HP OS. I had to manually uninstall the crap to free up HD space and system resources.