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."

Comments

Lenovo

[El Lobo]

As a responsable IT person at my university, I buy a lot of different hardware (laptops, stationary, servers)...

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.

Re:Lenovo

[BumbaCLot]

I can speak from experience that some of the Thinkpad software is not crap, but actually improves the operating of the computer.

Under IBM the battery and power scheme setups were a lot better at maintaining battery life. Some of these hardware manufacturers actually know what their hardware does and the best way to manage it!

Re:Lenovo

[piojo]

When I bought a Lenovo R-series computer with Vista Professional, I didn't notice a lot of crapware that they'd installed. Was it because it was a "professional" computer?

I installed Linux in a few days, so I might not have noticed everything that was there, but I actually liked some of the stuff they installed--like a driver for my hard drive's accelerometer (that would park the heads if needed) and a driver that let me configure Windows not to overcharge my battery.

Re:Lenovo

[Sillygates]

I liked the connection manager on windows XP, too.

It would let you set up profiles to turn off your firewall on certain networks, start printer sharing, and start file sharing.

It also let you setup static IP's VPNs, etc on certain networks....

Re:Lenovo

[Sperbels]

It's not crapware in the sense that it's extraneous crap you don't need. But it's crapware in the sense that you don't need to have all those EXEs in memory at startup. Windows is perfectly capable of loading the appropriate items into memory as they are needed.

Re:Lenovo

[heptapod]

43.5 megabytes for Adobe Reader just to read PDFs while an alternative like Foxit is just 5 megabytes to download, has a smaller footprint with minimal to no bloat. I've never had an issue with the latter and will use it to open PDFs that were unavailable with Adobe's products.

Re:Lenovo

[ColdWetDog]

Generally "business class" PCs tend to have less crapware that 'consumer' PCs which in a way is ironic since a large number of business PCs get their HDs wiped and a company specific image installed anyway.

IMHO, if it has a real uninstall script - that really uninstalls the damned program without magic incantations and four downloads from the manufacturers web site - then it's mostly harmless and I don't care. I can't for the life of me figure out why these companies don't do that....

Re:Lenovo

[DJRumpy]

Just in case anyone is actually curious, Apple was the top pick for the lowest memory usage, and it was crapware free. Not much of a surprise. I totally agree with the HP and Sony results. I own laptops from both and they are full to the rim with shovelware.

From TFA:
The Verdict: The Crapware Con
Posted on 29 Oct 2009 at 14:53
It looks like crapware is here to stay, so what’s the best way to deal with it?
Over the course of this feature, we’ve uncovered two important facts: first, no big-brand laptop (aside from Apple) is free from crapware, but it’s possible to buy a machine that’s noticeably faster and less cluttered than many of its competitors.

We also found that several manufacturers were more guilty than others when it came to adding unwanted software – with Acer, Sony and HP being the worst offenders.

The Acer, for instance, offered an unnecessary Windows Media Center clone and 19 games with only 60 minutes of play, while the Sony VAIO VGN-NS30E/S took more than three minutes to boot. HP’s Pavilion dv6 was little better, with a poor boot time, sluggish performance and flawed applications.
The Dell and Asus machines both included genuinely useful applications and also offered swift boot times and good performance elsewhere

Other machines, meanwhile, proved far more palatable, offering the holy grail of decent software that didn’t prove too taxing on hardware. The Dell and Asus machines both included genuinely useful applications and also offered swift boot times and good performance elsewhere.
Further analysis reveals that, when it comes to performance, it’s the proprietary software that does the most damage. McAfee Security Center, for instance, is present on five of the machines we’ve tested – and their boot times and performance figures spread the gamut from the Dell’s speed to the Sony’s sluggish excess.

Likewise, Norton products sit on both the quick Asus and slow HP machines, and Roxio Creator is present on the relatively nippy Lenovo as well as the Sony VAIO.

The three slowest systems on test are those that cram in proprietary software. The Acer was stuffed with games, media applications and other tools, and the HP system contained children’s desktop software, games and HP’s own Total Care Advisor.

The Sony VAIO, this month’s slowest laptop, boasted a desktop dock, VAIO-branded utilities and the all-encompassing Me & My VAIO media suite.

Re:Lenovo

[Brian Gordon]

Foxit is evil with its crapware installer and explorer extensions. It's fat when running too. Try SumatraPDF.

Re:Lenovo

[Runaway1956]

Call me biased - I only work on machines that freinds, family and acquaintances bring me. I believe the summary, and TFA to be pretty much on target. IMHO - if the vendor won't include a clean MS installation disk with your purchase, there's a reason for that. Always insist on that clean installation disk, NOT a recovery disk. Dell, in general, is the cleanest machine to work on, and they don't install tons of crapware. Maybe half a ton, but not tons. There is no introductory software, or free software, or whatever else that is worth bothering with. Whatever it is that you want, you can download it straight from the source, without Lenovo, Compaq, or any of the others deciding what you need.

Crapware - anything on the system that I didn't specifically ask for and explicitly consent to.

Re:Lenovo

[AmiMoJo]

iTunes for Windows is by far the most bloated bit of software I have ever seen. The shear amount of crap it installs in unbeliveable:

        * iTunes itself
        * Quicktime
        * Apple Mobile Device service
        * Bonjour Service
        * iPod Service
        * iTunesHelper startup task
        * QTTask startup task
        * Firefox plugin
        * iPod Classic drivers
        * iPhone drivers
        * Apple Software Update

Grand Total: 276MB

Actually, they removed the DNS Resolver service from iTunes 8 (wtf - Windows can already resolve DNS).

On top of all that, iTunes itself contains half of MacOS. OSX font rendering and associated fonts, graphic rendering elements etc.

You also have every supported language installed, and support for every Apple device (iPod Classic, iPod Touch, iPhone, AppleTV), network sharing and streaming... The list goes on.

I could just about forgive all this if there was an alternative, but if you own an iPhone or an iPod Touch there isn't. Apple decided to encrypt the iTunes database and make it impossible for 3rd party software to work with their hardware.

Re:Lenovo

[clone53421]

I love PDFs, but not so much Reader. It's more of a necessary evil... although for most purposes I could probably get away with using an alternative PDF viewer.

I always install a PDF printer (PDFCreator is a nice one, but if you just want something vanilla then CutePDF Writer usually does the job). Then I use it for anything that says "print this page for your records". Digital, indexable copy of whatever it is, arranged by the date I printed it, with no wasted paper or ink.

Short of PDF, I don't know what else you'd use... XPS? XPS is just as bad as PDF, except it's from Microsoft instead of Adobe. Wait... does that make it as bad, or worse? Nobody uses XPS.

What I do hate, with a fucking passion, are protected PDFs. Especially since CutePDF tends to crash (prints an error message document) when you try to print a protected PDF through it to remove the protection... this is, in fact, one of the only uses I've ever had for the MS XPS Document Writer (sometimes it'll succeed where CutePDF or PDFCreator fail, then I can reprint the XPS as a PDF).

Re:Lenovo

[Hognoxious]

You need to know which registry entries to delete. Generally crapware doesn't exactly volunteer that information.

I know who has the least...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple.

Re:no wonder people are switching to Mac

[Machtyn]

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.

Good recent experience with Asus

[elrous0]

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.

PC Decrapifier

[flyingfsck]

The best one is not mentioned in the crappy article: http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/

In Store Techs

[Ceiynt]

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.

Recovery DVD

[tepples]

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.)

Re:Even better

[DigitalSorceress]

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!

Download Microsoft "autorun" and turn stuff off

[Animats]

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.