funny

Nick - you are ever so funny and cunningly clever. How you managed to weave in that little Vista flame is such a stroke of genius. God I wished I was you.

A class action against Toshiba for this scam...

...is absolutely needed. They have no right to oblige to use any DRM of theirs to use the machine.
Is that a TPM/TCPM DRM thing that the driver is using ? Is that device preventing the user to install any other OS other than removing the Toshiba DRM spyware thing ?

Typical Corporate crap

If this is true and I have no reason to doubt it then Toshiba is one step up on almost all the other computer vendors. The first thing I use to do when I use to buy my PCs from vendors is format the drive and install the copy of Windows fresh to rid it of all the crap they stuck on it. (Sony Vaio and Dell)
This trick by Toshiba is sad and hopefully the word about this gets out and their sales decline.
Build your own Linux rigs I say, you save allot and no crap installed unless you want to consider the bloated spyware Vista a piece of crap and I do save for playing DX10 games and it sucks at that too because of being so freaking bloated.
As far as laptops go I buy Mac.

That's why

I stopped buying tosh laptops for this very reason. The hardware quality is great, but bloatware was why my last two notebooks were sharp and fujitsu

Dont buy laptops with vista

Like comment above me said, I too am used to formatting my computers after purchasing them. Does this mean that you cant ever format your computer? (oh i think I see - you have to use that 'recovery' partition that just puts the bloatware back on)..

I thought it was BS that you couldnt put XP on a lot of laptops, but not even being able to use a clean copy of vista has got to be violating some of my rights.

Do yourself a favor and get a Thinkpad. They still release XP drivers. I got one and immediately blew away the copy of vista that I had technically just paid for. It felt good

Hmm

Well, I'm on a Toshiba laptop I bought a couple of months ago when I was in the States. It's running Vista (ouch) and I was going to wipe it and stick a copy of XP that typically says 'Aaargh' and holds a cutlass, but Vista ran fast enough to satisfy me.

In any case, the various toshiba utils and apps (touchpad util, hardware drivers util, toshiba updates util, maybe a couple of others) tended to load themselves on startup. I simply disabled the startup registry entries and now I don't fret about it. They don't run and nothing's gone wrong. They use about 10MB of space; it's hardly killing my machine. Uninstalling a utility to do with your hardware, made by the manufacturer, pre-installed on a custom-hardware laptop, seems slightly unwise to me.

Load of BS

Sorry, but I have run Toshiba notebooks exclusively here since 2001 & have never had a single problem with uninstalling the "bloatware" that is supposedly the Toshiba applications, on either XP or Vista. As I type this the notebook I am using is a Toshiba running Vista without any of the Toshiba applications installed. They are not required unless you use the hot keys or wish to change BIOS options from within the OS. If anything the machines run more STABLE without them installed.

I saw this on Toshiba L45

My experience recently holds this report/allegation as true. I purchased a Satellite L45-S7409 which came preinstalled with Vista Home Basic. The laptop was for a family member whose company uses a hard drive encryption method under Win XP which enables the encrypted volume to connect to their email servers. So, Vista Basic just wasn't going to do for him. After some fiddling I got the machine to triple boot Win XP Pro, Vista Home Basic and Ubuntu 7.10. It remained in this state for some weeks and working superbly. And then the family member brought the machine to me and asked me to remove some pre-installed Vista software to free up some more storage space on that NTFS volume. I've been working with OEM laptops for 15 years. So I uninstalled (using Control Panel/Uninstall Programs) some NON-TOSHIBA bloatware and trial pay stuff. Almost immediately the machine had a barrage of errors upon start of the Vista OS concerning ie4uinit.exe, SdbGetAppCompatDataSize, rundll32.exe, svchost.exe_iphlpsvc, and assorted dynamic link errors for apphelp.dll. The uninstalls were of NON-TOSHIBA, non-driver, non-hardware junk such as trials for Microsoft Office and of course the McAfee scam. Removing all the crap freed more than 2,000 MB (uh yeah, 2GB, not 10 MB) of free space. This is simply poor apt uninstall scripting. Fortunately, the OEM version of XP Pro sp2c which I put on the laptop works great, and very fast.

Bad Toshiba

About Toshiba Software, I have 2 laptop, Tecra S1 and Portege 2000. Both with minimum build in software. Just use msconfig to only allow certain program to start. I also can't unistall acrobat reader 5, which I want to install version 7 so I don't have 2 version on my laptop.

BUT TOSHIBA HAS BEEN MAKE MY $1700 LAPTOP (TECRA S1) TO BE JUNK AND RESELL $75 4 YEARS LETTER. Because of broken VGA memori on the motherboard. And Tohsiba refuse to replace with new one even it stil below 3 years. And for your information, Toshiba is bad because @ 1 year the motherboard has been broken, but they replace it with new one. The second year the motherboard is broken AGAIN. DAMN. Now I buy DELL Latitute D630 and hopefully my new $1700 will not become $75 in four years.
[-o<

Hmm (mark 2)

Travis: yeah, it sounds like you had a lot more stuff preinstalled on yours than on mine. I didn't have McAfee, or any of that stuff (hence the 10MB rather than 2GB), and if I had done I definitely would have tried to uninstall it just as you did. McAfee is a really nasty piece of work -- especially when you try to get rid of it! Where did you pick up your laptop? I got mine from Tiger Direct. My suspicion is that your retailer put that additional crap on the machine -- not Toshiba.

Tosh

Tosh. I recently bought a Toshiba laptop for two reasons:

1. Great hardware
2. I could still get XP Home (useful sometimes, and less money to M$)

Bloatware came off easily, NTFS partition squashed nicely, Ubuntu installed cleanly in the free space.

Result: Great laptop in about all ways.

Don't be daft

I love the way people just say buy a MAC or get linux. Like it's that easy!

MACs cost twice as much sure it's quality kit, but it essential does the same things as vista, but just costs a lot more and none of the software you already own works on it!

And linux, dont make me laugh, it's like the weeker younger brother of windows, that doesn't play your games, and installing a programme feels about as hard as putting a shuttle into space.

Toshiba has been doing this for years

Since the early 00's at least. They install so much "management" software on their system, that if you prevent it from loading with the O.S. via either msconfig or deleting the registry entries, the system will BSOD.

Reformat

Just reformat whatever branded systems you get. How difficult can it be?

I thought Vista was the bloatware

Just running a clean install of XP with all the updates was too much bloatware for me. I've almost completely uninstalled it from my house, and it's hanging on by poor support from Canon, who won't give me a Linux driver.

I can't imagine a computer that is more bloated than a clean install of Vista, which somehow manages to make XP look very good. It blows my mind that computer professionals think is perfectly acceptable for an operating system to require 2GB of RAM for general use. I can run high-end data processing, at industry leading speed, in half that.

No big deal to me

I recently purchased a Toshiba Satellite P205. It has Vista preinstalled along with MacAffee and some other stuff. I removed the MacAffee without any problems. I left the Toshiba registration and some of the weird demo stuff. My Toshiba came with two system restore disks so I could restore the system to its factory settings if anything went wrong. I actually used the disks and they work fine. They even allow you to put Vista onto a smaller partition. Also my Toshiba works great with Ubuntu Linux ix_64 and Debian Linux ix_64 (amd64, NOT IA64).

The bloatware is a small nuisance but it doesn't get in the way of me enjoying the computer running Vista. I don't know if Toshiba ships a system restore CD with every computer or not but that can make a big difference in whether your computer becomes a headache or a pleasure to use.

My first vista experience was on a Toshiba...

And it was horrible. I hadn't touched it and a student brought a wrecked toshiba that was brand new on September 07 pre-loaded with Vista. Would not resolve dns for some reason, I've seen that a lot, kids.

I backed up her stuff and wiped with from the restore partition and got a taste of how a Toshiba laptop is right out of the box brand new. Just the act of trying to get everything updated had me near jumping out the window with a rope tied around my neck. I have never been bombarded with so many severe sounding nags about critical this and very serious that, 20 windows popping open practically screaming to DO THIS, CLICK THAT! LET WINDOWS HELP ME!!!

I know how I can let windows help me, buy more apples anyway. I am sure in an enterprise or academic environment vista will be much less offensive than I found it, with none of this crap-consumer empowering by idiot choices crap bloatware coming out of the seams, but since my first vista experience was with a toshiba new out of the box?

I can pretty much say I detest vista. And Toshiba. For those saying that buying a mac will not run your existing software, I started on windows, went dual platform in '99, had a mac in my home in '05 and went 100% mac in late '06. If you must must must run your windows apps, buy a mac and have a dual boot machine with whichever version you want. Get parallels and you won't even have to reboot into windows to get done what you need to get done.

The switch takes time, dedicated PC users will have a mac and win pc side by side for about a year before they can comfortably walk away and never look back, but that is exactly what you will do once you make the choice to work in mac os and not windows.