Crapware – Just Say No
Just because Giveaway of the Day offers a new free software title every day doesn’t mean you have to install it. Please, only install software you will use, and be aware of which applications are running in the background. Stop laptop abuse now!
I spent my lunch hour today cleaning up a co-worker’s Acer Aspire One netbook running Windows XP. She had so much crapware on there, it would hardly run. That’s not an exaggeration; Internet Explorer took almost two minutes just to open. Getting into the Control Panel took close to five minutes.
I uninstalled what she didn’t need (Desktop Icon Toy? Seriously? On a Netbook?), and made sure other things were not running at startup (Adobe updater, JAVA, MSN Messenger, etc.). I also got rid of Google toolbar for IE (IE 8 has a search box you can point to Google, folks) and Google Desktop (a widget engine that runs in the background – only she didn’t even have any widgets open! And do you really need widgets on a 10 inch screen?).
With her permission, I then got rid of the lame Acer-included games (pure crapware). For casual games, it’s hard to beat Pogo. If you need access to games offline, Pogo also has a big download section – the downloadable games cost money, but most have free trials.
I even uninstalled the version of McAfee Internet Security she was running. It’s way too big and bloated for a netbook. I replaced it with the impressively lean and capable Microsoft Security Essentials (a freebie).
I also installed CCleaner, an awesome utilty for de-cluttering your pc. It can quickly clean up all manner of temporary files, allows access to your startup configuration, and is a much better application uninstaller than the one found in the Windows Control Panel.
The Acer netbook went from being sluggish and almost unusable to snappy and responsive. I’m pretty sure it still won’t run Photoshop very well – yes, she’s got it installed but hasn’t used it yet – but for almost any other task it should do just fine. If you really need to do basic photo editing on an underpowered netbook with a tiny screen, I recommend Google’s Picasa or the impressive Paint.Net (both free). Save Photoshop for something with a little more horsepower and a bigger screen.
It’s always a good idea to use some discipline when installing programs on your pc, but it’s especially important on a netbook with very limited resource. These machines offer a lot of functionality, but they can be easily overwhelmed with slow and unnecessary software.
