CloudingClarity

A recent study by PC Pro proves what we geeks have long since known. The boot times and performance of new PC systems are severely inhibited by the pre-configured software put on them by manufacturers such as Acer, HP, Sony, and Dell. Most brand new systems ship with tons of crapware, bloatware, and every other kind of program that needlessly slows down your new purchase. These free applications, seem great at first, but you must realize that they do not typically provide any useful value. To the contrary, these applications are generally 30-day trials, games, or replica software that mimics what windows already comes with (for example Sony has their own version of media center). Your computer will have less available memory and hard drive space as a result. By the time a user installs their required applications, the computer may not have enough computing power to go around. In the end, we may be finding ourselves working on computers that are slower than the ones we were replacing in the first place! Ok, perhaps that maybe a little dramatic.

Ironically, I’ve heard of people celebrating their new purchase simply based on “all the free software” that came with it. In fact, they felt that the more software it came with, the better the deal they got. They believed that they were really getting their money’s worth. Once I made them aware of the problem they immediately realized that they hadn’t been given a free gift, they had been bamboozled! Once I cleaned off all the junk software, they noticed an instantaneous difference in performance.

Getting back to the results of the study, it revealed that Acer has the longest additional boot time at 2 minutes. Sony was not much better crossing the finish line just under the 2 minute mark. Much to my surprise, Dell and HP actually had fairly speed boot times, adding only 52 seconds and 1:35 respectively. [...]

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