How long before all consumer PC brands are owned by either HP or Dell.

...one could argue that they already bit the dust when HP bought them two years ago, this announcement merely completes the "sell-out" :s

Not as long as I can build computers myself.That way I get what I want,not what some corporate BS artist allows.

That will be a sad day indeed....

Or even worse when everything becomes a Hell P.

Some people want 'big brand values' or at least the perceived values thereof. They will buy Dell, HP etc.

Some people want the expertise you get from a niche player. These people will always exist. When one niche player exits (either by getting it wrong and going bust, or getting it right and by being bought for mega bucks) another comes along, starting from scratch with a new cool name. Often many of the people are the same, for employees too like to live in their niche.

Companies evolve too.

Great, now these systems will come bundled with more crapware than anyone ever thought possible! (Although, this probably happen as soon as HP laid their hands on them.)

P.S. Why does an HP scanner's "driver" have to occupy more than 50MB (or was it 100MB, can't recall, it was so long ago?) of space! And then why does both the hardware and the software suck more than the previous versions ever did? Probably because people see quantity before quality...

Because it's a big 'suite' of apps you couldn't give a monkey about once it's finished installing.

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I wish that big vendors would for home users offer a 'bundled' and 'os only' install option on the recovery disks, certainly easy to maintain on vista installs thanks to WIM. We use HP pc's here in the office and the first thing that happens on arrival is we splatter it with our image and go to the website for the drivers, no bundled garbage. Why can't home users get the same treatment, I want a fresh OS with drivers only, and not yahoo/aol/google/etc/etc preinstalled.

I'm guessing you have the Universal Printer Driver, which allows a lot of HP printers including MFPs with scanners to use just the one driver - very convenient if you have to look after loads of different HP printers/MFPs, but a bit of a pain in drivespace for the average home user.