The Consumerist (and Best Buy) got some stuff right, and some wrong, IMO. Just for background info, I'm the founder of a rapidly growing I.T. consulting company, with both individual, small business, and corporate clients.

1: Laptops and vendor computers certainly could use a thorough going-over when they're unboxed. Of the various vendors, Dell is the least offensive this way, and Acer is one of the worst.

1a: Most vendors are installing various Norton or Symantec products by default, one of the worst anti-virus products available on the market. Norton's actual catch rating is -- literally -- only about 50%, and to get even that high, it has measurable negative impacts on system performance. Notably, it has a pernicious bug in its email scanner that can cause it, spontaneously, to interrupt email service several months down the road. Removing Norton is not as easy as you might think. Inexplicably, the removal process varies from system to system. On one memorable system, it took me two hours to remove it; its own uninstaller crashed every time, refusing to uninstall anything, my copy of the special Norton Removal Tool that can be downloaded was "out of date" (I had downloaded it just three weeks before), and the Norton website was broken and wouldn't allow me to download a new copy. The computer would not reboot into safe mode -- upon starting in safe mode it would reboot back to normal -- and initial attempts at manual removal caused the program to reload its files upon reboot. Despite having a fully updated version of Norton, the computer was riddled with viruses and other garbage.

1b: The "cleanup" is not something I'd recommend for the average user -- and I'm all for teaching users how to use their computer. Unfortunately, it's gotten very hard to tell what to keep from what to throw away. There are no clues other than experience. For example: Dell's moronic "wireless manager" can't be uninstalled without taking the laptop's wireless drivers with it, but there's a way to disable it and let Windows handle the wireless interface, which is more reliable and reduces clutter in the system tray.

2: Where Consumer Reports found a decrease in system speed, it's likely that "Geek Squad" accidentally removed one of the manufacturer's OS updates.

3: If the "cleanup" was done right, and if it was truly optional, $40 is a really fair price for it. Even if we assume that they've got some in-house tools that automate this, the process would likely still take at least 20 minutes and require oversight by a skilled technician. Part of my business is about kicking Geek Squad in the pants every chance I get, but I doubt I could beat that price.

4: There are some system tweaks that can really help things along, that wouldn't show up on a benchmark. One that comes to mind immediately is the particularly stupid network-related services configuration in Vista. The services aren't started automatically, so for dialup users especially this means a very long wait time every time the user opens up Internet Explorer for the first time.

5: Sending users to "msconfig" without directions was a particularly stupid move by Consumerist. The registry at least looks scary enough to ward off most novices, but msconfig makes things really easy to change -- and can result in very strange system behavior.

6: I have not been impressed by CCleaner, nor does PC Decrapifier do a very good job of cleaning up a new system. CCleaner has given me some work in the past in the form of newly unreliable printer behavior, and we tried using PC Decrapifier for a while before concluding that we could actually do the job much faster manually.

7: Spybot Search & Destroy is really not that great as a preventative program. Avira (http://free-av.com/) is a much better piece of software, also free, although the free version has two annoying habits which can be disabled easily.

So, should new systems be "optimized" by trained techs working for a company that actually cares about its customers? Hell yes. Unfortunately, neither Best Buy nor Geek Squad got it right.