Insights For Success

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Bloatware

How to quickly get rid of crapware & bloatware from that new PC

technologyEdward Kiledjian

Save your PC from OEM installed bloatware and crapware

Buy any name brand PC and it will likely come with an OS littered with bloatware and crapware. Why do manufacturers do this? Money.

What kinds of bloatware do they install?

  1. Free security software - I use the word free loosely since in most cases it is one of the name brand products that is known to be slow and sluggish. In addition to the performance hit this may cause, it is usually a very short time trial based license.
  2. Browser toolbars - Manufacturers are paid to install these and often get a percentage of revenues generated by users clicking through. Again these will slow down your machine. If you use Chrome, there is no reason to install an additional toolbar since searching the web is as simply as typing your query and pressing ENTER.
  3. "Bonus" software - Depending on the OEM, you may get a whole boatload of extra software from CD burning software with ads to backup clients requiring subscriptions to time-limited Word processing apps.

What should I do

Before I start using any new PC, I usually re-install the Operating System using a Microsoft source disk (since restoring from the OEM disk or recovery partition will bring back all of the original crapware).

But many people are not comfortable reinstalling their operating system since you may need to perform some manual configurations and find hardware driver. Here is where a free software called PC Decrapifier comes in.

Here is a direct link to download the latest version of the app.

How does it work?

You download the app and run it. It scans your PC and finds the list of software it considers Crapware. You approve or modify the list and then ask the software to automatically uninstall the chosen ones. And voila, after a little bit of time, the garbage is gone.

Using this automated approach can save you hours (compared to manually uninstalling the apps).

It also gives you the option to remove other program that may not be "crapware" but that you may want removed.

IF you are looking for a great tool to cleanly uninstall software from your Windows PC (not crapware but other software) then read my article about Revo here.