Blogs The Most Annoying Crapware

I must be one of the few people who actually like GFWL. It allows me to grow my gamerscore that I started on my old 360(s) without the indignity of having to use, be deafened by, and constantly replace a 360.

As for crapware, if you can't build your PC yourself, or if you want a laptop that isn't a macbook, I heartily recommend Novatech - nice laptops, just an OS installed (or you can have one without an OS and install your own). I have a Novatech store near me and I'm there all the time buying odds & sods - same prices as their website.

 

Or many business level OEMs (you know that you dont' need to be a business to buy those)

 

The most annoying pre-insalled program I've ever come accross is a Norton Antivirus free trial which would frequently tell you to buy Norton whenever you booted up.

Trying to remove it took a special program that I had to download from the Norton website!

 

I set up a Dell laptop for a friend last week and spent longer removing crap than I did actually installing software.

 

At work when we get new Dell laptops in I always give it a fresh reinstall to remove the bloatware. The downside is that you have to install all the drivers manually which can take a bit of time.

I vote Sony for being the worst on crapware though.

 

You must be pretty near to me then - I also live near a Novatech store, and there's only one in Wales .

Pre-installed OS's are the worst culprit, IMO. First thing I do with a new laptop is customise the install disc (using nLite) so I can strip out all the pre-installed OEM crap.

 

my experience with nLite, vLite, was terrible, you always end up with a broken Windows with issues. Install Windows as is, and you have the best Windows experience. by far. Yes i did read tutorials, yes i did my research, yes I followed everything by the letter, yes I did try several times (4 times actually). And beside, the ONLY advantage I saw is to save a few MegaBytes on your 2 TeraByte HDD.. so, really no need. I believe the OS should be installed with the system. It's something that everyone do, why not do it already. Did you ever buy a device like an an MP3 player, and it firmware was not installed? Of course not, it's silly and simply annoying thing, it's not worth pissing off 99% of it's users, just to have 1-10 people happy, because they get to install the OS themselves.

 

Although I find Novatech products good price and it's only 20 minutes from here (head office in Cosham, nr Portsmouth), I personally find their computers of low quality mainly using their own generic brand and the cases are cheap with far too many sharp corners. Their laptops are ok but I wouldn't recommend one even if their OS is the standard Windows install.

If you want reliable laptops go for IBM, they now have style with their Lenovo range! If you want a good computer I'd go for Packard Bell, their recent models (2008 onwards) are superb and a lot of older computers I see tend to be Packard Bell too. Their crapware isn't too bad either.

 

Small detail: I believe IBM doesn't own Lenovo anymore... In fact Lenovo purchase IBM PC division.

 

Wikipedia suggests you are correct although IBM still hold less than 5% of shares in Lenovo (as of February this year) so I'm 5% right.

 

Thats exactly what i do. Buy new laptop and it never actually boots into the OS that was pre installed, Its takes about the same amount of time installing drivers as it does finding and removing crap.

 

Samsung are pretty bad in my eyes - Vista came with a load of bollocks and with the Windows 7 RC I had to set the screen brightness to 100% (permanently) in the BIOS because you couldn't change it without Samsung drivers which weren't available

They also had some "AV centre" software that provided nothing that Media Centre doesn't provide, takes up its own special button and can even load a light OS if your computer is off... but it takes the same amount of time to load as Vista (or it did the only time I tried) and didn't find anything I wanted to play

I think it is pretty bad that you have to spend time "setting up" a new computer that should come ready to use.

 

This is where Apple have one me over, with their laptops anyway. Their laptops arrive ready to go, no extra bloat and the hardware works properly with the software. They may cost a bit more but the unibody ones are great quality.

I wouldn't go near one of their desktops with a bargepole, but their laptops are great.

 

most cards do this. most cards also have a big scary warning sticker over the fold on the anti-static bag telling you to install the software on the provided CD *before* you install the card, so that windows update doesn't pull in the drivers. most people don't realize windows update will get the drivers and follow the instructions on the box, and end up with a PC full of crap.

sony definitely deserves a place on any crapware shitlist. i was playing around with a viao a couple weeks ago that took 11 minutes to boot vista. i disabled all the sony preinstalls and boot time dropped to under 3 minutes.

 

At CyberPower we try not to install any crapware, last week I found a particularly insidious and difficult to remove piece on an LG SATA DVD drive. It is called BlueBird and tries to autoplay every time you close the DVD draw without a disc in using 6MB of un-formatable storage. There is a removal tool but LG pulled this from their site and published a different firmware. Which didn't cover the drive I found it on. Unticking a box on ASUS installall is nothing to the lengths it took to remove Bluebird.

 

and only one in Reading and only one in Bristol and only one in Portsmouth!

 

Err..has no-one heard of PC Decrapifier?

http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/

Worked for me on a few Dell PCs...

 

windows office trials with OS's...
Internet toolbars with browsers...
BTs stupid yahoo chat messenger...

Its a real problem for people who are slightly less Computer literate though, such as my younger sister who bought a laptop for itunes, and now has so many internet user search bars it takes up half her screen!

 

Yeah, I totaly agree but for me the ASK toolbar (what a piece of crap) and anyhting with Yahoo in the title really get on my nerves. Trying to get rid of them is like scraping dog crap off your shoe while pulling your teeth out with a small squirell's a**e cheeks!

 

BT with their sticker on the home hub stating you must install their crapware before connecting to your pc.

i believe other isp's do it as well

windows actually handles wireless connections better than the wireless manager shite they all supply