CloudingClarity

Preinstalled Software: A Gift or Curse?

Posted on 03. Feb, 2010 by Eric in Convenience

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.

The chart below, provided by Gizmodo summarizes PC Pro’s findings:

Acer: 2:01 longer boot time, 952MB larger memory footprint, 2.4GB less HDD space
HP: 1:35 longer boot time, 1.06GB larger memory footprint, 2.18GB less HDD space
Dell: 0:52 longer boot time, 1.18GB larger memory footprint, 3GB less HDD space
Sony: 1:54 longer boot time, 1.11GB larger memory footprint, 1.3GB less HDD space

So what lesson can we take from this? Should we never buy another brand new PC again? I fear that is not a feasible option. I would recommend that when you purchase a computer, buy it online and pay the extra $10 for a Windows 7 installation disc. Then reinstall the operating system once it arrives and skip installing the “application disk”. Then you will have a truly fresh, clean PC with its undivided attention focused on your tasks. A second and much easier option would be to purchase your computer from one of Microsoft’s brand new stores, it will come without any bloatware whatsoever. Microsoft stores are few and far between though, so that is not an option for everyone. The third method, which I use, is to uninstall every single program from the PC, except for few that I know I will use. This doesn’t restore the computer to run as though it has a clean install, but it helps quite a bit.

Finally, there are many software packages which promise to remove crapware/bloatware from your PC, but I have not experimented with any at this point to recommend. Have any of you sucessfully removed all the junk off of your new computers? If so, how? What method did you use?

Tags: Acer, boot times, crapware