> You read complaints on HN all the time that sure make it seem like we have entered a Malaise Era in computing. Us developers surely do not run computers set u

> You read complaints on HN all the time that sure make it seem like we have entered a Malaise Era in computing. Us developers surely do not run computers set up like the average consumer, and you can be darn sure that corporate executives at Microsoft and Apple do not get plain vanilla laptops fresh off the production line. One of my college internships involved setting up laptops for VIPs and Executives for exactly these reasons! We optimized the installs, removed crud ware, and setup the system to be as well performing as possible, then shipped them out. At one point Lenovo made a laptop where they cut costs by removing the cache on the HDD, there was nothing we could do to make that machine not horrible. Multiple minutes to do simple tasks, installing Office took hours! It was horrible, their reputation was so bad a number of them came back to us not even having been opened.