SAN FRANCISCO — Before they ship PCs to retailers like Best Buy, computer makers load them up with lots of free software. For $30, Best Buy will get rid of it for you.  That simple cleanup service is threatening the precarious economics of the personal computer industry. Software companies pay hundreds of millions of dollars to PC makers like Hewlett-Packard to install their photo tools, financial programs and other products, usually with some tie-in to a paid service or upgrade. With margins growing thinner than most laptops, this critical revenue can make the difference between profit and loss for the computer makers, industry analysts say. If the programs are removed, the software makers gain no value out of the $2 to $10 they typically pay H. P. and others to install them on each PC — and PC makers miss out on their cut from revenue-sharing deals. But Best Buy, the nation’s largest electronics retailer, tells computer buyers that the preinstalled software, also known as bloatware, can clutter their machines and slow them down. “You’d be surprised how often consumers tell us to get rid of it,” said Robert Stephens, the head of Geek Squad, the technical support division of Best Buy that removes the software. He declined to say how many people were paying for the service, but said that “it’s going to increase in popularity.” The demand for the service, along with similar offers from Circuit City and other chains, reflects an outpouring of consumer frustration with the way that a brand-new computer can feel as if it is full of digital infomercials — even if those come-ons knock a few dollars off the PC’s price tag. The Web has dozens of do-it-yourself guides to removing such software, which, as one tutorial puts it, “turns your computer into a messy battleground.” Mr. Stephens said the personal computer makers should be worried about the demand for less cluttered computers. “No matter what manufacturers want, we’ll give consumers what they want,” he said. But he added that he believed computer makers would find different ways to profit: “While they may be scared by these trends, they’ll be O.K.” As it turns out, H. P., the world’s largest technology company, is already working on a fundamental change in the way it packages software on its new computers, and thus how its business model works. Stephen DeWitt, who oversees H. P.’s personal computer business in the Americas, said that starting next year the company’s new computers would point users to a Web site where they can buy and download games, productivity software and other programs. Revenue from the site will be split in some fashion among H. P., a retailer like Best Buy and the makers of the software. Mr. DeWitt said the change would cut how much software comes preloaded. Mr. DeWitt said this was happening because consumers were demanding something different, but also because the technology was now in place to allow downloading of software on demand. For now, he said, the benefits to consumers of the free software far outweigh whatever small slowdown it might cause. And he said Best Buy’s cleanup service was not pressuring H. P. to move to a new model. “There’s no tension coming from Best Buy on this — none,” he said. But in Best Buy stores in Northern California, there is clear evidence of the different agendas of Best Buy and the computer makers. The stores display two H. P. computers, identical except that one desktop is cluttered with software icons from eBay, Quicken, AOL, Yahoo and others, while the other is entirely cleaned up. Best Buy workers use the display to promote the company’s $30 “optimization” service. Industry analysts said that the planned change in H. P.’s approach could well reflect Best Buy’s growing influence — and its ability to exact new concessions from computer makers. They said Best Buy has benefited from two key changes: the declining fortunes of competing retailers like CompUSA and some large regional chains, and the addition to its shelves in the last year of computers made by Dell and Apple. Bob Kaufman, a spokesman for Dell, said, “This is an evolving story and Dell is evaluating how it can best deliver software to its customers.” Best Buy’s offer to remove software began in 2006. But recently the toll its policies are taking has heightened considerably, analysts and industry executives say. “Best Buy’s sway is definitely growing,” said Matt Fassler, an industry analyst who covers Best Buy for Goldman Sachs. He said the company had good relationships with computer makers, and, while it wouldn’t seek to harm those relationships, “if they have a strong competitive position, it is incumbent on them to use it.” Mr. Fassler estimates Best Buy will have sales of $44 billion this year. Of that, $1.5 billion to $2 billion will be from the sale of H. P. computers, analysts estimated. One important question is whether the new model being developed by H. P. will be as profitable as the current one. Mr. DeWitt said he expected it to be more profitable. But A. M. Sacconaghi Jr., an industry analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, said the change could imperil H. P.’s profitability, in part because there is no guarantee that consumers will buy software offered through H. P. instead of another site. As software buying moves online, Mr. Sacconaghi asked, “what makes a consumer go to HP.com over Google?” He also says the challenge for personal computer makers is that they are losing control of what shows up on PC screens — a form of real estate that they have used to sell billboard advertising for software. “They no longer have that real estate advantage,” he said. “There’s a substantial profit pool at risk.” And there can be little profit to begin with, analysts said. The profit margin on many personal computers can be 5 percent or lower, depending on the model. The margins are slim in part because of intense competition that has driven down prices. In some cases, the computers are profitable only because their makers earn $30 or more for each computer for preinstalling the software, according to Shaw Wu, an industry analyst with American Technology Research. And J. P. Gownder, an analyst at Forrester Research, said, “For the average PC, that could be the entire margin.” Without the preloaded software, Mr. Gownder said, “it could put them in the red. That’s why they’ve become so addicted to it.” Mr. Stephens of Geek Squad says he agrees with H. P. that the future is in allowing computer buyers to choose and download what they want. But he said he believed Best Buy, not H. P., was in the best position to help people choose what works for them because, he argued, the in-store technicians are in closest contact with them. “Geek Squad agents have one thing over Apple and Microsoft engineers. We spend most of the day talking to people,” he said.

In an effort to cast himself as independent of the influence of money on politics, Senator Barack Obama often highlights the campaign contributions of $200 or less that have amounted to fully half of the $340 million he has collected so far. But records show that one-third of his record-breaking haul has come from donations of $1,000 or more: a total of $112 million, more than Senator John McCain, Mr. Obama’s Republican rival, or Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, his opponent in the Democratic primaries, raised in contributions of that size. Behind those larger donations is a phalanx of more than 500 Obama “bundlers,” fund-raisers who have each collected contributions totaling $50,000 or more. Many of the bundlers come from industries with critical interests in Washington. Nearly three dozen of the bundlers have raised more than $500,000 each, including more than a half-dozen who have passed the $1 million mark and one or two who have exceeded $2 million, according to interviews with fund-raisers. While his campaign has cited its volume of small donations as a rationale for his decision to opt out of public financing for the general election, Mr. Obama has worked to build a network of big-dollar supporters from the time he began contemplating a run for the United States Senate. He tapped into well-connected people in Chicago prior to the 2004 Senate race, and once elected, set out across the country starting to cultivate some of his party’s most influential money collectors. He courted them with the savvy of a veteran politician, through phone calls, meals and one-on-one meetings; he wrote thank-you cards and remembered birthdays; he sent them autographed copies of his book and doted on their children. The fruits of his efforts have put Mr. Obama’s major donors on a pace that almost rivals the $147 million raised by President Bush’s network of Pioneers and Rangers in contributions of $1,000 or larger during the 2004 primary season. Given his decision not to accept public financing, Mr. Obama is counting on his bundlers to help him raise $300 million for his general-election campaign and another $180 million for the Democratic National Committee. An analysis of campaign finance records shows that about two-thirds of his bundlers are concentrated in four major industries: law, securities and investments, real estate and entertainment. Lawyers make up the largest group, numbering roughly 130, with many of them working for firms that also have lobbying arms. At least 100 Obama bundlers are top executives or brokers from investment businesses: nearly two dozen work for financial titans like Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs or Citigroup. About 40 others come from the real estate industry. The biggest fund-raisers include people like Julius Genachowski, a former senior official at the Federal Communications Commission and a technology executive who is new to political fund-raising; Robert Wolf, president and chief operating officer of UBS Investment Bank; James A. Torrey, a New York hedge-fund investor; and Charles H. Rivkin, chief executive of an animation studio in Los Angeles. “It’s fairly clear that this is being packaged as an extraordinary new kind of fund-raising, and the Internet is a new and powerful part of it,” said Michael J. Malbin, executive director of the Campaign Finance Institute. “But it’s also clear that many of the old donors are still there and important.” The care and feeding that top Obama fund-raisers have received underscores their significance to his campaign. Members of his National Finance Committee who fulfill their commitment to raise at least $250,000 are being rewarded with trips to the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Finance committee members participate in conference calls with top campaign officials every other week. The fund-raisers meet quarterly, often with Mr. Obama dropping in. He lingered after the most recent meeting in June in Chicago, telling his staff he wanted to thank every person in the room. Some fund-raisers who knocked on doors for Mr. Obama in places like Indiana, Iowa and Pennsylvania got to spend time with Mr. Obama backstage before and after speeches on primary nights. His fund-raisers invariably say their support for him is not rooted in any kind of promise of access, but rather their belief in him. “This is about Barack Obama and changing the direction of our country,” said Jonathan B. Perdue, a business consultant in Mill Valley, Calif., who has raised more than $250,000 for Mr. Obama’s campaign. Mr. Obama has pledged not to accept donations from lobbyists or political action committees registered with the federal government. But some top donors clearly have policy and political agendas. Hedge-fund executives, for example, have bundled large sums for Mr. Obama at a time when their industry has been looking to increase its clout in Washington. Kenneth C. Griffin, chief executive officer of Citadel Investment Group in Chicago, has collected more than $50,000 for Mr. Obama. But Mr. Griffin, whose $1.5 billion in income in 2007 made him one of the country’s highest-paid hedge-fund executives, has given generously over the years to Republicans as well, and he recently helped to hold a fund-raiser for Mr. McCain. Citadel has spent more than $1.1 million, dating back to 2007, in lobbying against higher tax rates for hedge-fund gains. (Mr. Obama has supported the higher tax rates.) Similarly, Paul Tudor Jones, a billionaire hedge-fund manager from Connecticut, has raised more than $100,000 for Mr. Obama. But he also gave to Mr. McCain, to Rudolph W. Giuliani and to Mitt Romney. Mr. Jones, who has given more than $900,000 over the last decade to federal candidates and political organizations, helped form a trade association that has fought hedge-fund regulation. Many fund-raisers sit on the campaign’s array of policy working groups, getting a chance to weigh in on policy positions and speeches. Mr. Genachowski, a Harvard Law School classmate of Mr. Obama, leads the technology working group. Fund-raisers from private equity and hedge funds sit on Mr. Obama’s economic policy group. Despite Mr. Obama’s image as a newcomer, many of his bundlers are Democratic Party stalwarts, including people who were some of the top fund-raisers for Senator John Kerry in 2004. At least 58 of them appear to have personally made more than $100,000 in contributions to federal candidates and committees over the last decade. Updated bundler lists released recently by the McCain and Obama campaigns show that they have similar numbers of high-dollar fund-raisers. The Obama fund-raising operation is meticulously organized. Bundlers are assigned tracking numbers, and the finance staff sends them quarterly reminders of how they are doing in meeting their goals. “There’s no price for admission,” said Alan D. Solomont, a top Democratic fund-raiser in Boston who made his fortune in the nursing home industry and has given more than $1.5 million to Democratic candidates and causes. “We value every donation and every donor equally. But we are a performance-based organization. We want everybody to feel like they’re included, but at the same time we’re not here to have tea together.” Mr. Obama began courting many of his fund-raisers soon after he burst upon the national scene with his rousing speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Mr. Solomont, a major fund-raiser both for Mr. Kerry and for Bill Clinton during their presidential runs, received a call on his cellphone in February 2005, a year after Mr. Obama’s election to the Senate, from a member of his staff who asked if he would like to get together with Mr. Obama. They met for Chinese food in Washington the following week, and Mr. Obama scored points with Mr. Solomont when he pointed out that they had both been community organizers earlier in their careers. “I’ve been involved in politics a long time,” Mr. Solomont said. “Nobody’s bothered to know that about me.” Early that same year, Mr. Obama attended a dinner in the Bay Area for about 20 major Kerry supporters. The dinner was organized by Mark Gorenberg, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who was Mr. Kerry’s single biggest fund-raiser, after Mr. Obama’s staff members contacted him. Several of those on hand, including Mr. Gorenberg and John Roos, head of a Silicon Valley law firm, became among the earliest and biggest check collectors for Mr. Obama’s presidential bid. In 2006, Mr. Obama became a vice chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, giving him the opportunity to campaign across the country and to cultivate other potential benefactors. When his book “The Audacity of Hope” came out later that year, his staff members organized book parties at the homes of major Democratic donors. In December, Mr. Obama visited the New York office of the billionaire investor George Soros to court a roomful of high-powered Democratic fund-raisers, hoping to lure some of them away from Mrs. Clinton. Not everyone was swayed, but Mr. Obama won over Orin Kramer, a hedge-fund executive from New Jersey, and Mr. Wolf, the UBS executive, both of whom are now among Mr. Obama’s biggest fund-raisers. Mr. Obama signed on as his finance director Julianna Smoot, who had led fund-raising for Senate Democrats and, before that, for Senator Tom Daschle when he was majority leader. With guidance from Ms. Smoot, a key part of the campaign’s fast start was its success in scooping up top former Kerry fund-raisers, including Lou Susman, a Chicago investment banker who was Mr. Kerry’s national finance chairman, and Kirk Wagar, a lawyer in Miami who became Mr. Obama’s finance chairman in Florida. Even so, the initial meeting of Mr. Obama’s national finance committee, held in Chicago the day after he officially announced his candidacy, was a relatively small affair, numbering about 75 people. Penny Pritzker, the billionaire heiress to the Hyatt hotel fortune whom Mr. Obama asked to become his finance chairwoman, challenged the group to double in size. The number of bundlers ballooned quickly. The Obama campaign made important inroads among affluent people under age 45, including Silicon Valley engineers and hedge-fund analysts, many of whom had not been on the political radar screen. Donations in June, the latest month for which Mr. Obama has disclosed his donors to the Federal Election Commission, illustrate the double-barreled nature of the campaign’s fund-raising. Mr. Obama brought in nearly $31 million in contributions of less than $200, his best month for small donations. But he also collected more than $12 million in contributions of $1,000 or more, the most since the first half of 2007. The share from large contributions appears poised to increase, as Mr. Obama has stepped up his fund-raising schedule. “In 2007, the campaign relied on the tried and true methods like fund-raisers, for both large- and small-dollar donors, with the candidate or his surrogates, and the Internet largely financed it in 2008,” said Kirk Dornbush, the president of a biotech firm and a top fund-raiser in Atlanta. “When you combine the traditional fund-raising methods with the continued online contributions, you have a very, very powerful fund-raising engine.”

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — The United States opened two days of intense economic talks with China on Tuesday with the Treasury secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. declaring that despite recent tensions over trade, investment and food and product safety, ties between the two countries were “growing in a positive direction.” “The United States and China don’t always agree on economic issues,” Mr. Paulson said in prepared remarks Tuesday at the United States Naval Academy on the Severn River here. “Sometimes we may even disagree quite strongly. But we keep talking.” Seeking to smooth the way for the discussions, Mr. Paulson said that while China faced many economic difficulties, so did the United States. One reason that China does not import more American goods, he said, was that its savings rate was so high. In the United States, he said the savings rate was too low. The last round of talks in December in Beijing set up a 10-year goal of cooperating on energy and the environment, and Mr. Paulson said he hoped that the two countries could take additional steps in that area. “As the two largest net importers of oil, China and the United States face similar challenges as demand for energy increases, and the global production capacity has remained relatively flat for the past 10 years,” he said. In the last several months, Mr. Paulson said there has been progress on issues like monitoring the safety of food and other products imported from China. Now, he said, China needed to do more to crack down on piracy and counterfeiting of American goods, including software and movies, and opening its markets to American investments and goods. The trade deficit between the United States and China topped $250 billion last year, causing some anxiety in Congress. Mr. Paulson’s comments came the morning after Chinese and American businesses, seeking to overcome mutual suspicion of foreign investment, announced $14 billion in new deals. The deals involve $8 billion in Chinese investments and purchases of aircraft engines, telecommunications equipment, semiconductors and electronic components, said Chen Deming, minister of commerce in China. Another $6 billion involved American purchases and investments in China. Among the American companies signing deals were Chrysler, Cisco Systems, Ford Motor, General Motors, I.B.M., Motorola, Sun Microsystems, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments. In an interview on Monday, Mr. Paulson said the meetings were not meant to resolve specific disputes but to discuss how to overcome economic downturns and deal with impending crises in energy and the environment. “The tone will be one of constructive engagement,” Mr. Paulson said. “We’re going to be dealing with some of the most fundamental economic issues there are. I know some people would like to see quick fixes. But the most important issues don’t avail themselves to quick fixes.” The Chinese delegation is scheduled to meet with President Bush at the White House on Wednesday afternoon. The Annapolis talks are the fourth in a twice-a-year series that Mr. Paulson started when he left Goldman Sachs to become Treasury chief in 2006. The biggest issue at the time was American irritation over China’s intervention in currency markets to purchase dollars and keep the value of the dollar high in relation to China’s currency. Since mid-2005, China has allowed its currency, the yuan, to appreciate nearly 20 percent, easing at least some of the criticism in Congress. The Bush administration continues to accuse China of raising barriers to foreign investment, and China has increasingly complained that its attempts to invest in America often provoke an outcry. Mr. Paulson said that, although China had made only limited reforms in its economy and taken limited steps to open its market to American goods and investment, the “strategic economic dialogue,” known as the S.E.D., produced more progress than otherwise would have been the case. “I would argue that the reason we’ve made progress is that the S.E.D. is a mechanism for convincing China that certain things are in their interest,” he said, citing American efforts to get China to open its economy to foreign investment and to lift government subsidies of export industries. In recent months, the Chinese government has pushed back with demands that the United States do more to open its economy to Chinese investments and to halt the depreciation of the dollar against European and other currencies, a trend many economists say has helped drive up oil and food prices. The Chinese delegation will be led by Wang Qishan, a vice premier and former mayor of Beijing, and a graduate of Northwestern University, who took office as the country’s chief economic negotiator earlier this year. He succeeded Wu Yi, one of the highest-ranking women in China and often described as a tough negotiator. Mr. Paulson said that though China had lately stepped up its criticism of the United States, “I sure didn’t find Wu Yi to be a shrinking violet.”

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