As far as I know, all updates were applied. That's another point my friend mentioned, that when they first connected the machine it had to download and install updates for ages. That's another unique Microsoft and partner problem. Vendors shipping crap OS installations that need updating when they're sold.

SP1, as far as the reports I've read when searching about this problem, also does not fix it.

We weren't touching the network and the problem is most definitely with Explorer as I mentioned DirOpus went fairly quickly.

We first noticed it when trying to transfer 611 images ranging in size from 1 to 3MB from a DVD I had just brought over. Then the more recent copy was from an external USB 1TB disk partition (a second partition of 500MB was also mounted from that drive).

These are systems HP is shipping like this. If I was able to find hundreds of matches on Google, you can reasonably expect it affects thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people. My friend said he would not likely have ever searched Google about the issue, let alone jump on a forum to post about it - like 90%+ of other purchasers.

I'd like to see some of these points in Microsoft's new commercials.

On top of the slow copy speed, the OS also felt crazy slow. Don't even get me started on the difficulty in finding the control panels and settings/properties. The system was a Core2Duo at 2.something GHz and CPU utilization as reported from Task Mgr was negligible in all cases.

IMO, Vista is a step backward from Windows 3.1. I can't imagine that in the short time they've been working on Windows 7 that it's going to be anything but suck part 2.

If I seem overly negative it's probably because this stuff is all coming to a head with me. I'm tired of supporting people using such unusable products. I'm going to start taking a harder line on this topic, but in as friendly a way as possible. I need to steer more friends into dumping Windows and to stop supporting companies, like HP, that put out such terrible hardware.

HP and others need to open their eyes and look at the auto industry. In many ways it's foreshadowing what may very well happen to them, at least in the consumer space.

As far as crapware goes, the only thing I found RUNNING was some HP control deck thing, which I quit, and Norton Anti-VIrus, which I also disabled. Reports found on the net were about all makes/models of machines, desktops, notebooks, etc. Again, file copying with DirOpus was orders of magnitude faster. I used it only as a work-around though. I wouldn't dream of telling a relative computer novice that they needed to use an alternate/replacement file manager instead of Explorer because the $1300 they just dropped on a machine wasn't enough to be able to copy files between disks.

If I was quite a bit better off financially, I'd cut friends a check for the difference in price between whatever machines they were looking at and a comparable or better Mac, just to get them to make the right decision. But, I don't suggest everyone get a Mac. There's a place for a generic PC in many people's lives, especially non-novices. I have multiple non-Apple machines myself.