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Who Installs the Most Crapware?
Barence writes "PC Pro has done a thorough test of the software bundled by nine of the leading laptop manufacturers to find out who installs the most crapware on their PCs. Manufacturers such as Acer add as much as two minutes to their boot times by stuffing their machines full of bundled software, with own-brand proprietary software being the worst offender. HP's bundled apps, meanwhile, have a memory footprint of more than 1GB. PC Pro has also reviewed three pieces of software which promise to remove rubbish from your PC — with mixed results."
I ALWAYS format the computer before giving it to the final user, but as a rule I can tell you that any "big" name out there installs a lot of crapware, but the winner is: LENOVO.
The last Dells I've got have:
1. Adobe reader
2. Google toolbar
3. Google Desktop (!!!! ahhhggg the pain)
4. Adobe Flash player
5. Lots of Dell crapware like Support center and so on..
Lenovo: 1. Adobe reader
2. MS Office 30 days trial (yes, trials ARE crapware in my book)
3. McAffee antivirus + Firewall + anything (60 days trial)
4. Google toolbar
5. Google Desktop
6. Google Chrome (AHHHHHHH MORE PAIN)
7. Adobe flash player
8. Skype (!!!)
10. Lots and I mean LOOOOTS of Lenovo panels, gadgets and stuff
HP 1. Adobe reader
2. Norton antivirus + Firewall + anything (60 days trial)
4. Google toolbar
5. Google Desktop
6. Lots of gadgets and added HP value"
On the bright side, Dell always gives you a new brand Windows CD and a CD with drivers so the re-installation is easy.
Lenovo? They give you a Restore CD that installs the system with all the crap from the beginning.
Oh well... At lest nobody else (that I know) is installing Abble crapware by default. The day some big name intalls iTunes, QuickTime, Safary or other Abble Supercrap, as default, that's the last day I buy such a brand for us.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Apple.
Dell's business computers can be ordered plain vanilla or without the OS loaded, if you wish. I always recommend their business line, whether the person asking is a business or home user.
I bought an Asus EEE netbook a few months back and was surprised to see that Skype was basically the only app that was installed by default. It was otherwise a pretty clean install of XP. Considering the experience I've had with other notebooks in recent years, I was pleasantly surprised. Kudos to them.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The best one is not mentioned in the crappy article: http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Offer a service to REMOVE all that junk for you when you buy it, for almost $100. That's the crazy part.
We bought my dad a laptop at Circuit City a few years back for Christmas, and the Firedog(sic?) tech was very persistent that we purchase the removal plan from them, as it's hard to do ourselves. I asked him what they do, and he said they take a vanilla Vista install disc and reformat the HDD with it. For $100, no thank you.
As someone stated in an above thread, it's ads on the computer to lower the cost of it. If you buy off the shelf computers, it may be worth it. And with a laptop/netbook, you have no choice but to buy it off the shelf.
FTA: tl;dr "with Acer, Sony and HP being the worst offenders."
I always use this first thing on new crap-loaded laptops that aren't going to get wiped with Linux.
http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/
Free as in beer for personal use.
When you order a computer with OS installation media, do those CD's / DVD's install the crapware as well, or just the basic OS?
Some of them come with a "recovery" DVD that repartitions the hard drive and ghosts the preinstalled operating system and crapware back on. (In fact, that's how they're set up.)
Not if you buy them from the Dell Outlet. These are factory-remanufactured current model and immediately previous model systems that are sold with the full (same as new) factory warantee, and at a significant discount. For example: several years ago, at work we were buying Dell Optiplex GX620 minitower systems, at a cost of approx $950 each. At this same time, I bought a "scratch & dent" unit of the same model, ram, cpu, harddrive for $419. I saw no reason for the system to be classified as a "scratch and dent", but I sure liked the price. I ran this deal past several co-workers at the time, who got similar deals on the same model. The Outlet machines come with the same 3-year warantee that the systems we bought at work came with. Since then I've bought several Inspiron and Vostro laptops from the Dell Outlet and have zero complaints with anything I've bought from there... No, I don't work for Dell, just think the Dell Outlet is the best place to buy a computer...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Well played sir, well played.
I'm not a Mac, I'm not a PC... I own both, and I use Linux and Solaris for servers. I see my computers are tools, but I am not.
As for the crapware, I tend to agree with TFA: My Macbook Pro had little (though, I'm an amateur photographer so I kind of think of iPhoto as a crapware version of LightRoom and PhotoShop). Dells that I've ordered through Small Business division (both for work and personal) have been free of it. Sony Vaios, HP Pavillions have been kind of loaded with it, and my Samsung netbook really wasn't too bad.
Wow, I've got way too many computers.
What.. have... I ... said? That's just the crazy talk right there!
The Digital Sorceress
Auto-start = highly increased chance of product being used = profit. That's why they PAY the OEMs to put their software on the computers, and that's partly why computers are so inexpensive. Because the OEMs have more revenue streams than just you.
My Samsung netbook is the only computer I've ever purchased which did not compel me to reinstall Windows due to pre-loaded crapware.
The only stuff that runs by default is useful power-management software and a trial of VirusScan. I really hope Samsung continues to make netbooks and other mobile devices. They are a breath of fresh air.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
HP installs so much crap our machines often stop booting entirely, take well over 5 minutes to reach a desktop, and perform poorly once they are up. And they install so much junk it's almost impossible to properly remove and clean it out. I've stopped buying *anything* HP because of that. It just isn't worth the frustration.
-Matt
Autorun, by Mark Russinovich at Microsoft, gives you a complete checklist of everything that's started at bootup or login. With checkboxes that turn it off. This is worth running just to see what's in there. You may turn too much off and break something, but you can run Autorun again and turn it back on.
There's plenty of stuff worth turning off, like those useless programs that keep polling to see if Adobe Acrobat or Sun Java came out with a new version. Some of those programs are too aggressive, too. Adobe's poller seems to try to re-associate PDF files with Acrobat, after I'd changed the ".pdf" association to launch Sumatra PDF.
It's annoying that even legitimate updaters seldom schedule themselves as periodic tasks, which Windows does well and which have no overhead when they're not running. No, they have to have their own little executable in memory.
Although having a PDF reader on any platform is a good idea. Having one that is removable is a good Idea. Personally I want the real option for IE and WMP.
My Dell Mini 10v came preinstalled with Dell crapware including the yahoo toolbar for use inside of Firefox. Firefox includes a search bar with Yahoo as an optional search provider. Simply chaning the default search on their config would have been fine and gotten them cash from Yahoo, but NOOOOO, they installed the whole toobar. On a netbook, an additional toolbar is pretty irritating. I wiped the whole system and installed a clean Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it. Now I am happy again.