A few months back Sony was forced to scrap its outrageous plans to charge punters extra to get their brand new laptop clean of “crapware” – the useless bundles of trial software that seem to clog up more and more systems that enter the Labs thse days.

Many of you left comments agreeing that enough is enough, and reader rjp2000 made the point that the printer and camera markets are just as bad as laptop manufacturers. From experience I knew that (s)he was spot on, but this month that point has been rammed home far more irritatingly than I ever imagined.

You see, I’m currently holed up in the dark and lonely PC Pro Labs with a haul of printers and all-in-ones fast approaching 20. That’s a lot of printers. That’s a lot of printing, scanning and copying. But, most painfully, that’s one heck of a lot of installing.

From downloading one manufacturer’s driver and application setup file of a ludicrous 198MB, to another installing a list of accompanying applications that went well into double figures, pretty much every installation of a printer has taken 20 minutes or more. Programs to ease printing; to simplify scanning; to put pretty little cartoon frames around your photos before you print them and inevitably bin them in disappointment.

Does anyone actually use these things?

Of all the printers I’ve owned, I’ve never made use of any of the bundled applications. OCR software I can admittedly see the point of, but apart from that there’s nothing useful this crapware does that I can’t do in the simple driver settings. Even in a graphics utility as basic as Microsoft Paint, clicking Print | Preferences brings up the very same options as you’ll find in something as advanced as Photoshop, so no expensive software is required to access your printer’s full potential.

Thankfully, most printer installations at least give you the option of selecting which individual utilities to install. But with most also burying the whole lot in an “Easy Install” button, manufacturers know that their bloated, irritating and largely useless bundled extras will nonetheless make their way on to a huge number of PCs.