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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."
The crapware installed on thses computers are advertisements. These computers would cost a lot more money if they didn't have all this preinstalled rubbish on the HDD, but I'd much rather take a couple minutes to remove Spore Creature Creator from my new HP than pay the extra money for buying an "ad-free" computer.
Maybe this is why Macs are so expensive for the same hardware.
But in other areas the MacBook merely mimics Windows' offerings: media software offers little functionality that isn't available elsewhere, and Apple's office applications can't compete with even Microsoft Works.
I wonder if they've ever used the iWork suite? It can both read & save as MS Word/Excel/Powerpoint for the respective equivalent applications, which is something MS Works apparently can't do. I know this by the number of students I have to instruct to save their MS Works documents as RTFs so their instructors can view their papers.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I was standing in Best Buy line one day at the computer desk. They were buying a brand new laptop (forgot the brand), but they got the complete upsale from the Geek Squad guy. Basically he told them that yes they could buy the laptop for the listed price, but that it would be unusable because of all the junk on it. They would need to pay geek squad another $149 to take the computer and clean up all the junk that comes with it to make it usable. And the poor people had to do it... They had no idea what to do or uninstall, and were being told that if they didnt do it then the computer would be near unusable.
Sadly the geek squad guy was close to the truth. A new computer that isn't cleaned is booting slower, using more memory, and running slower than it should be. It just was wrong that it was necessary for the unskilled user to have to pay $149 on top of the cost of the device... I thought about jumping in and telling them it was a rip off, but then I'd have had to deal with it....
Compare the performance of something like FoxIt PDF Reader ( http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/ ) against Adobe Reader, and then tell me with a straight face that Adobe's version is better. And if you leave Windows-land and get to Linux, then there's options like evince which are also significantly better than Adobe's offering.
And honestly, the only reason that Flash is installed on my computer at all is for YouTube. If I had a choice in the matter, I wouldn't have that load of crap at all... more often than not, it's used for intrusive ads on websites, not anything of actual value. (gawd, I hate surfing at work, where I am in serious hock if I'm caught using anything other than MSIE 6.0... *shudder*)
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
So you are saying the GIMP is superior to Photoshop.
I don't know what he's saying, but I'm saying PSP9 is superior to Photoshop.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Yep, and it also updates the adware on your laptop.
(This hit me too - I updated the software on my T60 and up pops some Lenovo ads)
It's one of three reasons:
1. The release engineer who coded the installer is clueless about the registry, about windows standards, and is a void.
2. They want to make it so difficult to uninstall that you decide to keep their scumware installed rather than go through the bother of removing it (or paying someone else to remove it)
3. Product management refuses to let the release engineer do things the right way (see below)
I've designed many installers, and I've inherited spaghetti-coded installer projects that had to be nearly completely rewritten (Installshield pro). I was always blocked by management from completely redesigning it but every time I had to add new functionality to a module I would completely rewrite and comment the code. The first release after I took on the project included fixes which made it clean up after itself on an uninstall (mostly hacks to work around code I wasn't allowed to rewrite). At one point I was so fed up with maintaining the shitty code that I wrote a whole new installer in Installshield Developer on my own home computer on my home time and brought it in and demoed it. I FINALLY won everyone over - except marketing, who put a stop to it. Why? Because "it's different" - the thing is, I made it compliant to Windows Logo program standards, had it self-repairing and everything. They (marketing) were so put off by the fact that it was different that they didn't care that it was modern and MORE marketable because the installer didn't look like it was for a 16 bit OS any more (keep in mind this was in 2001, and last I heard they were STILL using the same crappy old installer). So, I deleted the code. (justice was served though: months later they offshored development, I was let go, thank GOD - I was the only one they retained through the end of the year, and a few months later they gave me a generous offer to come back, and also asked if I happened to have the installer. I said hell no to coming back because it was DISGUSTING how they laid off all my friends the day before thanksgiving, and I also told them there is no way I am giving them work I did on my own equipment on my own time.)
Speaking of which I really miss release engineering. I really ought to go back to it.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Masonux is a Ubuntu mod with minimal stuff - but has Synaptic on it so guys like me can install just what they want. Small image, small HD footprint. Crap free!
BIGstan!
Adobe Reader is crapware.
There are two well known alternatives of decreasing footprint, FoxIt Reader (which is about as bloated as Acrobat Reader 6), and SumatraPDF, which is tiny, fast and, feature light.
Question everything
My brother bought a Sony laptop from one of those electronics and furniture and white goods all in one stores (Harvey Norman for people in Australia to reference), and they didn't give him any sort of discs at all. They simply said that when he needed a reformat or a service to bring it back in. I do believe I warned him repeatedly and gave him much better options, but then if there is something that every IT nerd knows, it's that family members will ask for advice on IT related issues, and then consistently go and do the exact opposite thing. No doubt Harvey Norman charge a tidy sum for running through the reformat/install on a recovery disk for 15 mins.