When someone gets a new computer most people are excited. They are finally able to use that once piece of software that they have been wanting to test out. This excitement quickly dies down when you have to spend over two hours trying to clean up all of the preinstalled junk on the computer.
Quite a bit of preinstalled software I believe is sheer junk and leans towards the edge of spyware. To me if a piece of software tracks a users every move on the internet then it is spyware. Google and alexa toolbars are great examples. They might have legitimate purposes for wanting people to use their toolbars and the functions in them may even be good, but they still track the users every move. If you look at the alexa site it states it is not spyware/adware, I disagree.
So, why do these hardware manufacturers allow this software preinstalled? Money. When trying to stay competitive in the computer hardware realm the company has to have razor thin margins of profit. To make up for this they allow companies, like google, to pay them to have software preinstalled. A company like google wants people to use their services so they are willing to pay good money to have their programs installed. (They also pay Mozilla to be the default search engine in Firefox)
To fix this people will start having to pay more for their computers. My personal choice when buying a new computer is to reformat the sucker as soon as it comes in the door. This is by far not the cheapest route, but it is often the fastest and easiest. To be able to use the same serial number that came with the computer you will also have to get a OEM copy of Windows. To find this you may have to go through some not so legal channels, but in my opinion if you are still using the cd key that came with your own computer you are not stealing anything. Odds are Microsoft thinks quite differently.
Another option is to buy a computer without all of this junk preinstalled. You then come to a very limiting factor. The only company that I know of that states that they do not preinstall software is Falcon Northwest. If you buy one of their computers you will be shelling out an arm and a leg. There are probably other companies that do not preinstall software, but off the top of my head I can not think of any.
Even Apple who has commercials stating they don’t have the bloat has a bit. My laptop came preinstalled with MS Office 2004 trial. This is not nearly as bad as other manufacturers, but it still is preinstalled non-free software. Removing this software only took me a few minutes to figure out how to uninstall it. Comparatively, it is clean compared to any other popular hardware company.
Preinstalled software is defiantly one thing that I hate about Windows. I can not blame Microsoft for this, but it is an industry standard for pre-built computers.
