| Pay More to Get Rid of Crapware from PCs | Today's Top Stories | ||||||||||||
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(Column) - A recent news report on CNET News.com talks about the age old problem of crapware, or bloatware, to put it more politely, on PCs from the likes of Dell, HP and Gateway. Obviously, companies don’t include added applications for the fun of it. They generate a pretty decent chunk of change by unnecessarily forcing us to deal with those applications. Although the companies are doing well with bloatware and use this as an alternative way to generate revenue on the ever slimming PC margins, these apps are honestly ruining the user experience. Not to mention, many times these applications are the cause of a lot of issues. Now, for those of us who don’t mind tinkering with our PCs, it’s an annoyingly painful experience, but we can remedy that by either removing those applications through Add/Remove Programs or wipe the drive clean and start from scratch. However, for the unfortunate average user, who may not be familiar with these steps (mainly reformatting the drive), it’s going to drive him nuts. Clearly, we need to compromise and deal with this situation maturely if both parties are to win. Taxed Net Sales Are Perfectly Alright One way to do that would be to let users pick and install a minimum number of applications they want to install from a dropdown menu on their own. Although it’ll still be crapware, at least it will be somewhat useful to the user and his needs. And hopefully, we won’t see two competitive products from two separate companies to confuse the user (I’m looking at McAfee and Norton with their antivirus offerings.). For companies, they get to offer more choices to encourage users to preinstall some of these applications. It’s a decent solution, but definitely a win-win one. With that said, here’s a better compromise. Why not have users pay an extra $25 to get a crapware-less PC, as the article suggests. That way, the companies could still beef up their bottom line and we can get a shiny new PC with absolutely nothing on it. I’m sure paying $25 is a better option than spending the time to reformat the drive, deal with application conflicts or even going through the Add/Remove Programs to delete one program after another, and hope that it doesn’t cause the system to go bonkers. Although I don’t particularly agree with paying extra to remove something that we are not in control of to begin with, we have no choice but to work with PC manufacturers if we want to reach a respectable compromise. It’s obvious that we can’t just think about ourselves, or it’s always going to be an us vs. them battle. It’s better to think as a team, support each other and get a product that doesn’t include pure junk right out of the box. Do you have a better solution? and let me know. |
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