I installed Windows XP SP3 on my home PC this morning. The process went smoothly, and surprisingly quickly; but after the inevitable reboot a screen came up pestering me to turn on automatic updates. This I do not appreciate.

It’s not that I think automatic updates are necessarily a bad idea.* But why bug me about it now? I can only surmise that Microsoft really hates the fact that I’ve chosen to manage my own computer; so they’ve decided to tack a nuisance requester onto an unrelated process in the hope of nagging me into quiescence.

This sort of opportunistic piggybacking used to be the preserve of spyware. But, sad to say, these days I’m increasingly finding unrelated crap bundled into otherwise legitimate packages.

Generally, of course, it’s software or services that are being pushed, rather than paternalistic management policies. Take AVG Antivirus, for example – on installation it asks to change your default search provider to Yahoo!, as if that’s any of its business. The latest WinZip tries to install a trial of Uniblue RegistryBooster 2. And, if I’m not mistaken, don’t recent Firefox packages try to get you to install the Google Toolbar? Admittedly that is at least browser-related, but it’s still disappointing to see such flagrant shilling from a package which started out as the epitome of simple, stripped-down functionality.

Perhaps the most offensive culprit is Apple. Companies that bundle third-party software with free or shareware packages can at least argue that it brings in commission to offset the costs of development and distribution. But, as you probably saw in the news back in March, Apple has been using iTunes as a Trojan horse to push the ugly, redundant Safari for Windows onto users’ PCs. That’s no sponsorship deal – it’s a straightforward Microsoftesque power grab.

All right, it could be worse. For now, all of these unwanted collateral installations are optional. Keep your eyes open and you can untick the boxes, keep automatic updates turned off and lead a relatively happy and productive life.

But as bundling becomes an increasingly accepted fact of life, there’s nothing standing between popular packages and the old spyware trick of requiring you to install some unrelated third-party program in order to get the application you want. They could even check for its presence at runtime, to stop you simply clearing out the crap after installation. If things come to that, the best case scenario is a huge increase in clutter on your hard disk; the worst is resource conflicts and security holes caused by programs you didn’t ever even want to install.

If that’s where we’re heading, count me out. From now on, I’m not going to let any installer install anything that isn’t a bona fide program component. Even if the bundled application is something I want, I will download it separately, rather than legitimising the idea of bundling. And if there’s no way to get what I want in a standalone package, I will, so far as is practically feasible, do without.

I realise that this individual decision probably won’t make much difference in the grand scheme of things. Indeed, if everybody did the same, it’d squeeze developers who currently provide us with some great software for free. But while Microsoft clearly has trouble with the principle of “my computer, my decision”, I think it’s an important one, and I shall cling to it even if it means – deep breath – paying for software.

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* Automatic restarts, however, are an extremely bad idea. If I leave an application open while I go to lunch, I damn well expect it to still be there when I come back.