Dealing with bloatware
Written by Writer on Friday, October 3rd, 2008
Dealing with bloatware
Free start-up utilities can help block unwanted software from being loaded
I was watching a friend working on his new HP notebook. It had a large screen, lots of power, memory and storage. The person in question was a multi-year service technician and after a number of hours working with the machine he eventually wiped the hard drives and started from scratch.
Most mainstream manufacturers, when you fire up a new notebook for the first time, ask you a series of questions such as: “Do you want to install and activate Norton Anti-Virus?” For veteran computer users, the correct answer is “no” - because it acts like a virus itself and is very difficult to get off your machine once it has taken a foothold. Although, for others, it may be no problem to activate and have on their machine.
But in this case there were no such questions, software - often called bloatware - had all been preinstalled and activated. The machine also contained a special recovery partition put there by HP. Ironically there were actually two notebooks, the same model for the same price with the same purchase date but configured differently, including the number of partitions.
What all this additional, potentially unwanted stuff on a new notebook does is to slow things down. I have worked on notebooks myself where there is a plethora of stuff loading on start-up that the people using the machine did not know about and never used. I usually disable most of it. To do this yourself get a copy of any of the free start-up utilities and see what is being loaded.
The problem for many is that the only DVD you get from the manufacturer is an image disk that rebuilds the whole machine in the same way, with no choices and no flexibility.
Add Nero to the list of companies and products not to support. Try downloading Nero from the US if you don’t live there. You can’t and instead are directed to the local distributor. This will typically cost you much more to purchase the same product - and, of course, without any support in many places. One day, companies like Adobe and Nero will figure out that not letting people purchase online and then download their products just supports or encourages piracy.
One reader wrote in to comment on my Microsoft WIRUS recommendations. When you turn off automatic updates programs like Norton, that have linked themselves to Microsoft’s update, will stop updating. Since you want to retain regular updates and keep your computer protected as much as possible, one workaround is to open the relevant control panel and do a manual update on a regular basis. The other is to contact the software supplier and ask them how to have an auto update that is not linked to Microsoft’s service.
Industry news
Trojans are getting more creative as people in the UK found out recently. A big spam campaign claimed to have photos of an exploded nuclear plant on near London with pictures of victims. The attachment, as you can imagine, was just a .ZIP file with a Trojan horse.
Once installed, hackers could then spy on the contents of the victims computer. So instead of a true event this was a made-up one, but since a portion of the news we get these days is often made up or not verified a lot of people were tricked. As usual the correct action is to never open an attachment unless you trust the source or at the very least have run a couple of scans against it.
That low-cost PC not powerful enough? The Atom series of processors will come in dual core versions by the end of the month. This will allow the very cheap PCs to become more powerful. The new version will even support 64-bit processing. The 330 chip will probably come bolted to Intel’s new D945GCLF2 motherboard, which is a mini-ITX board based on the 945GC chipset and GMA 950 integrated graphics. Makers will then build their bits around that.
Microsoft’s Hyper V virtualisation software will drop the $28 per seat price tag and be free, not long after you read this. This is of course in response to VMware’s offer of its bare bones ESXi hypervisor for free.
Google’s Chrome has some more problems after the early security holes that were reported. Their end-user licensing agreement (EULA) stated that Google would retain “a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services.”
This paragraph came from their other terms of use licence but, for a browser, this implies that Google could capture and re-post anything a user did within the browser. You can imagine the feedback on this, so Google deleted the whole section from the EULA and changed it to “You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services.”
The US Computer Emergency Response Team (US-Cert) also issued a warning about a security risk in the Chrome browser’s default settings. The default is to accept all downloads without user notification. In today’s age of malware, Chrome users should go into set-up and turn on the “ask where to save each file before downloading” option. You can find this in the Minor Tweaks, Options tab.
It is that time of the year again where Apple does an update to their iRange of products. “What’s new?” You may well ask, the answer is mostly new colours. The Touch is getting a volume control on the side, how novel. It is thinner and now comes with a shiny metal back. The unit now also comes with its own speaker. They are also claiming 36 hours of music playback and 6 hours of video. Capacities have not changed.
The iPod shuffle now comes in more colours as does the nano range but no longer that short fat thing but back to the taller thinner version with 8 and 16 GB models. The new model is claimed to give 24 hours of music and 4 hours of video playback. The Nano will also read out loud the menu and song titles, allowing you to navigate without looking at the screen. If you shake the new nano it goes into shuffle mode. If you turn the unit sideways the screen will also rotate like the touch does. I’ll let you check on prices.
If you don’t like Apple then there are alternatives. The SanDisk Fuze for example does what the nano does but just comes in basic black and maxes out at 8 GB internally. You can however also add your own memory to increase the max storage.
Corwan’s iAudio A3 has a wonderful screen with excellent audio and video playback support for many different file types. Sizes range to 60 GB but the controls will look a little old fashioned to Apple lovers. Zen has their mosaic that has good battery life and is not quite as pricy as some of the others with up to 16 GB models available. I also like the iRiver Lplayer for audio and it even has a small screen.
