Preinstalled pests or added value? Either way, this clutter will clog up your machine. Mike Jennings looks at how much you can save by cutting it out
Unboxing a new laptop can be an emotional roller coaster. You peel off the plastic, gently raise the lid, tap the power button and watch with bated breath as the screen and LEDs blaze into life for the first time. Then, the familiar Start screen appears and» your face falls when you realise it’s littered with ugly, unwanted Live Tiles for programs you never asked for. Switch to the desktop and things aren’t much better - you're confronted with a mess of confusing extra icons and attention-grabbing pop-ups.
Crapware can have a real impact on performance: having to load up extra software means your PC takes longer to boot and uses more memory'. All those additional processes running constantly in the background can also tie up your hard disk and CPU, slowing down the applications you might actually want to use. Crapware is almost always easy to remove, but when your system comes with dozens of preinstalled packages - not all of them easy to identify, and some potentially masquerading as important system tools - it’s understandable that many choose to live with it.
But then you may start to wonder why you bothered spending all that money on a powerful PC, only to waste its resources in this way. Or, to turn the question around, what’s the value of the performance you can gain by ridding your system of crapware?
WHERE DOES IT COME FROM?
One of the biggest sources of crapware is third-party developers paying hardware makers to preinstall their software, with the aim of reaching a captive audience. As the laptop business has narrow margins, it’s a tempting deal for manufacturers - particularly at the budget end of the market, where low-cost machines are likely to come with a shovel-full of crapware. Unfortunately, such systems tend to come with low-end processors and limited storage, so they’re the ones that can least afford to be bogged down by unnecessary processes.
Not that a lower number of preinstalled applications is a guarantee of better performance. Crapware comes in all shapes and sizes: a custom app store may be a waste of space, but it shouldn’t slow down your PC, whereas a single heavyweight application that runs all the time could be a much bigger drain on resources.
As well as third-party software, laptops can come with manufacturer-branded software on top of the Windows installation. This may include unnecessary configuration tools - almost invariably these just rehouse options found elsewhere in Windows - and it’s common to see own-brand media players, cloud storage services or office applications. We suspect this is partly an attempt to reinforce the manufacturer’s brand, so the computer isn’t seen as a generic Windows machine. Manufacturers claim that such applications make the computer more useful out of the box - but we suspect most people would prefer to install industry-standard applications.
“I’ve not heard anyone say that proprietary apps have been a great success", noted Ranjit Atwal, a research director at Gartner, arguing that “people are prepared to pay for a decent piece of software" rather than falling back on unfamiliar alternatives.
There’s also a third type of unwanted software: that which you’re tricked into downloading and installing in the course of using it. Sometimes this happens when an unscrupulous software-download site uses a misleading link or image to lure you to install an unwanted program. Increasingly, though, software packages arc coming with more software actually bundled into the installer, which will be loaded automatically if you accept the installation defaults. Notorious examples include the Java Runtime and Adobe Reader installers - two outwardly respectable bits of software that try to sneak in a browser toolbar and a virus scanner, respectively, for good measure.
Although such software arrives via a different route, it’s very similar to the memory-hogging, third-party crapwTare on your new PC. In both cases, someone is paying to artificially inflate the installation base of their software by having it bundled with a product that people actually want. And the loser, again, is you. This type of software is just as intrusive and detrimental to your PC’s performance as preinstalled crapware - thankfully, you can normally audit and remove it in the same way.
Since everybody’s experience of downloaded crapware is different, however, on the following pages we’ll focus on the stuff that you can’t avoid - the potentially performance-sucking applications that are already lurking on your new PC before you even get the shiny thing out of the box.
To that end, we’ve lined up five typical laptops: a budget home computer, a sleek Ultrabook, a custom gaming system, a mobile workstation and a mid-range business laptop. We’ve booted up each one for the first time, examined the preinstalled software, measured its impact on performance (using the PC Pro Real World Benchmarks) and assessed the overall user experience.
Armed with this information, wre’ve put a rough-and-ready price on the performance you can regain for free by simply cutting the crapware.
Find and remove crapware on your own PC
Manually clearing out all the unwanted programs from your system doesn’t sound like fun - and you might be hesitant to do so in case something stops working. But, as we’ve seen on these pages, clearing out the filler can give you better performance, more free memory, a faster boot time, more hard disk space and a cleaner, uncluttered user experience.
DISABLING STARTUP ITEMS
The hallmark of the crapware-infested system is a dozen icons lurking in the system tray. Most of these probably represent unneeded third-party processes that are starting up every time your PC boots up.
In Windows 7 and 8 you can hide these icons by clicking the little upward arrow at the left of the notification area, selecting Customise then “Hide icon and notifications” for each process you don’t want. You can also delete unwanted desktop icons and hive Tiles from the Windows 8 Start screen.
This still leaves the processes silently running and consuming resources, however. It’s a better idea to prevent these startup processes from running in the first place. The way this is done depends on your OS: in Window's 7 and earlier, you can use the msconfig.exe tool to disable startup processes - type the tool’s name at the Search prompt to open it, then switch to the Startup tab and untick the items you don’t want to run. In Windows 8, open the task manager (by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc), click More Details if needed, then switch to the Start-up tab and select Disable to prevent unwanted items from running.
Don’t worry about disabling something important: Windows will still boot and run even if you disable everything, so we suggest you start by turning off almost everything - except for tools you want running all the time, such as Dropbox and antivirus. If this causes something to stop working, simply re-enable the relevant process and reboot.
REMOVING APPLICATIONS
Disabling startup items can save memory and increase performance, but it leaves software still taking up hard-disk space. The good news is that crapware can normally be easily uninstalled via the Programs And Features window' in the control panel. We suspect this is because offering an uninstallation procedure lends the software a veneer of legitimacy, and means it won’t be flagged and removed by antivirus software.
The easiest way to find all the preinstalled crapware is to open the Programs And Features window and click the “Installed On" column header; this will sort all the applications by their installation date. You can then scroll down to the bottom to see which tools and applications w'ere installed before you ever got your hands on the machine. You may have to use your judgement W'hen it comes to removing manufacturer-branded tools and applications; many are pointless, but a fewr might be useful. If you’re not sure about removing a given tool, check whether it’s possible to re-download it from the maker’s w'ebsite if you change your mind.
Alternatively, you can turn to a specialist tool to clear the crapw-are in a fewr clicks. One utility that can recognise and remove a large number of commonly unwanted applications is the PC Decrapifier (pcdecrapifter.com), which is free for personal use. It’s a “portable” application that doesn’t install anything permanently on your PC, so it wron’t tie up resources.
Be aware that bundled third party programs typically won’t be available to redowmload, so make sure you don’t need a given app before you bin it; if you don’t recognise it, launch it before you make a decision. If you do change your mind, however, there’s often a free equivalent - for example, you might replace Acer’s abDocs software with LibreOffice and Dropbox.
The future is... crap?
Clearly, it’s almost impossible to buy a crapware-free laptop from a big brand - even though, in many cases, the resources you can recover by clearing out the unwanted software are equivalent to a free upgrade.
The worst culprits were our Acer budget home laptop, Asus Ultrabook and Toshiba business laptop. All of these came with a slew' of preinstalled software; in some cases these were applications we didn’t mind using, but we’d have preferred the choice to start from a blank slate. When it came to unasked for app stores and bookmark managers - items we certainly wouldn’t have chosen to install for ourselves - wre felt like our new- laptop wras being hijacked, at the expense of performance and our experience.
Dell’s mobile workstation came with a better class of preinstalled application, but its benchmarks told a similar story of performance being dragged down.
The only provider who came out with unequivocal credit was Chillblast, a smaller retailer with a more bespoke approach - and it may be no coincidence that Chillblast walked away with the prize for best desktop PC brand in this year’s PC Pro Excellence Awards.
“We don’t want our clients to have a negative first experience,’’ Chillblast’s sales director Ben Miles assured us. “That’s wrhy we provide a completely clean installation of Windows, and only add software requested by our clients.” For those who like a few extras, you can choose to have your PC shipped with Chillblast’s family software pack, an opt-in selection of applications that includes OpenOffice, the GIMP Image editor and AVG’s free antivirus software.
It's also worth noting that Apple, a company much admired for its attention to the user experience, tightly controls the distribution of its own computers, ensuring unwanted third-party tools aren’t preinstalled.
ADDED VALUE OR ANNOYANCE?
Although crapware seems like an obvious negative, it’s been suggested that consumers’ attitudes may be softening - making them willing to see preinstalled software as something that adds value, rather than as an annoyance to be removed.
Jacques Lamontagne is vice president of product marketing for WinZip, software that comes preinstalled on Toshiba hardware. Speaking to PC Pro, he argued that laptop manufacturers who bundle WinZip are providing “an enriched experience from basic Windows" and that buying a system without extra software is like “buying a car with no extras".
Smartphones and tablets, he pointed out, “ship with a tonne of stuff on them. You’re not just getting an OS with a couple of apps [on a new smartphone]”, he told us, but “a tonne of apps and easy access to a tonne more. You’re getting a tonne of value.” He suggested that PCs not meeting this expectation appear “boring", and provide users with a weak first experience: “Manufacturers that offer a smartphone like experience are going to get more customer loyalty and satisfaction,” he said.
There may be an element of wishful thinking here. It’s questionable whether people feel more positively towards WinZip or their Toshiba laptop as a result of the companies’ preinstallation partnership.
Yet Gartner’s Ranjit Atwal agrees that bundled software is coming to be seen as a differentiator in the laptop market. “It becomes a competition,” he said. “You don’t want to be seen as not putting this free stuff on laptops."
If Atwral and Lamontagne are right, we shouldn’t expect crapware to go away any time soon. But perhaps we are seeing a shift of sorts: five years ago, when we rounded up the crapw'are preinstalled on a batch of 2009 vintage laptops, we found plenty of truly unnecessary software, including an application launcher that mimicked the OS X Dock and plenty of redundant disk cleanup tools. This time around, more respectable applications such as Evernote and Spotify were commonplace.
As laptop manufacturers jostle for ever slimmer margins, there’s reason to hope that market pressure might mean that when we switch on our future PCs for the first time, we might be greeted by more and more genuinely useful software.