Did i do the right thing

i recently got myself a fairly cheap laptop, if i said the specs youd laugh =P in american dollars it was around 500-600, anyway it was one of those laptops with a recovery partian on the hard drive to make a new installation cd as it came with none, fortunatly i have an official windows xp home disc

now my question is

Did i do the right thing wiping the drive clean, reason being, in its commercial state, it was full of shit like AOL instalations, etc, this is how it came with new, and other device driver shit that i dont need that was slowing it down

now it runs quicker, did i do a normal thing or a retarded thing?

You did the right thing if the first thing you did after wiping it was to install Linux.

>>1
I can't tell if you're serious or just a professional troll. What you did was ok, don't let anyone tell you to install the piece of shit that is Linux, though. And also Opera for that matter. I've tried Opera, it sucks about as hard as IE.

>>3

im actually being serious, the computer had a whole bunch of junk i didnt really need pre installed onto it on its partion drive, i now have more space, a faster more effecient windows os, and well the hassle of finding the drivers that havent auto installed yet... its not much of a hassle, but yeah

i was just wondering what computer experts/well knowledgable peeps thought, since i wasnt sure if i messed up or not lol

>>1
by wiping the partition, you not only got rid of the redundant windows crap (which shouldn't be an issue if you have a valid install disk), but you also got rid of any proprietary crap that came with the system.  in addition to the AOL installation shit, this could also include stuff like driver software for all the proprietary hardware that came on your laptop, which may not actually come with a default windows installation (but can probably be readily downloaded from the manufacturer's website).  this may or may not be an actual /loss/, but something that should be considered.

i would've burned off a backup cd on general principle before wiping the partition, but there should be no repercussions other than a slightly longer reinstallation procedure while you dig up all the drivers you need (and which probably would've needed to be updated anyway).

>>2

That's what I hate about laptops. Not only they come with Windows, but they come full of PURE SHIT from SHITTY VENDORS. Gay useless multimedia players, faggot launch bars, system tray BULLSHIT, ARGH MOTHERFUCKERS DIE DIE DIE HOW I HATE YOU. Just thinking about it is highly irritating. I despise every "value added" multimedia rhino turd laptops come with.

>>4
Yeah, but not all of your drivers are going to come with windows XP.  I'm sure if you checked device manager, you'd find a few missing.  If it's a new computer then it should be no problem finding those on the manufacturer's website.  It'll neve be completely clean of everything from when you first bought it, though, seeing as the parts themselves are propreitary...

why do you buy them? those companies pay money to "add value" thus reducing the price of the laptop

>>8

If you think that the price of the laptop is lower because of all that crappy shovelware, you're awfully naive.