There are lots of PC manufacturers in the UK, and each of them try to promote simplicity amongst their products, and most of them promote Windows Vista by hanging a large banner across the top of their website saying, “<company name> recommends Windows Vista Home Premium”. I don’t disagree with this: Windows Vista is a very cool OS that does everything XP did and more, the only thing I absolutely hate about PC manufacturers is the amount of rubbish they install on every single PC they sell. Really cool people call it “Bloatware”, I usually refer to it as “That crap that comes with your PC”.

For instance, on every PC we’ve ever purchased, the manufacturer has always kindly pre-installed a brand new 30 day trial of Symantec Norton Internet Security. They don’t even give the user a choice about whether they want Norton or not, and I expect a large majority of users don’t actually want to be connected to the Internet, so they only need basic security like the stuff that comes with Windows Vista. Even if the user does need an Internet security application, a new computer user would not have a clue on how to uninstall software, so when the trial of something like Norton ends, they are most likely to get about 60 annoying desktop pop ups per second shouting at them to buy a Norton subscription, or their PC will explode.

When the user first starts up their brand spanking new dual core machine, they are probably greeted by about 36 windows from various pieces of software that the manufacturer has pre-installed for the user. How is the user meant to have a good PC-using experience if they do this? I mean, wouldn’t a new user rather to just boot up onto the Windows Desktop and start using their pc, than to be greeted by “X pc backup” and the “X computer optimizer”.

Although these programs are annoying, it also makes the new user think that that’s what a Windows PC is like; slow at booting and pre-installed with crap. Obviously the Mac platform doesn’t have crap installed on it which they use as one of their selling points, but if Apple didn’t make their own hardware and released their OS to manufacturers for installation on new PC’s, they would probably end up with a similar problem.