It was covered in stickers. There were stickers on each side of the display, pointing out things that would presumably be on the screen when I turned it on. The trackpad had a sticker over it explaining the pinch-to-zoom gesture that everybody knows from the iPhone, yet iPhone users were never “helped” with a sticker on the screen.

When I powered it on for the first time ever, I was presented with the “Windows did not shut down properly, do you want to start in Safe Mode?” screen.

During Windows set up, it:

1. Tried to connect to the Internet automatically.
2. Told me it could not connect to the Internet and I’d have to configure it myself later.
3. Immediately asked if I wanted to connect to the Internet to send my registration information to Microsoft.

When I launched Outlook Express, a wizard walked me through the process of connecting to the Internet (even though I was already online), asking if I already had a dial-up account or wanted to sign up for one.

Fortunately, the PC wasn’t pre-loaded with too much crapware, which is a good thing. I’m finding it hard to read the thinly rendered text used in most of the system; fortunately Safari for Windows does it’s own text rendering. Like my MacBook, it supports two finger scrolling, but the cursor turns into a tiny scrollbar graphic (in case I don’t know what’s going on?) and the page jerks around instead of moving smoothly.

My dad bought a MacBook Air for my mom, and I spent a long time setting it up. On the whole, it was much more pleasant experience, though in the interest of fairness I’ll say that using Migration Assistant over a network connection is annoyingly unreliable.