Comments on: How to drown in “crapware”: buy a printer

By: camera lenses

camera lenses — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 09:06:32 +0000

camera lenses…

Panasonic’ ……

By: Lonekro

Lonekro — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:09:36 +0000

As a hedge against crapware of all sorts I recommend HyperOs One-click (http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk). It enables you to clone your operating system onto a Logical drive and boot into either. Test out your installations on the Clone until satisfied they are worthy and functional – then install to your C drive later. Any problems or infections from the web, just re-clone and out goes the old, in comes a fresh, untainted copy. Marvelous! I also keep my C Drive backed up using Acronis TrueImage Home so if that drive goes belly-up I can restore automatically at boot time. Costs around £50 for the two and worth every penny. You do also need partitioning software though, unless you buy the better version of HyperOs which comes complete.
[no connection with either company!].
http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/

By: Aitch

Aitch — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 12:37:52 +0000

This is so very true – I have the same experience with HP printers and masses of useless apps. It’s not the space, it’s the proliferation of menu items, the pollution of the registry and worst of all, the auto update checking mechanisms. Every program wants to be your new best friend!!

I rebuilt my vista PC this weekend, first by listing all my apps and steadfastly refusing to reinstall the worst crapware offenders. In many cases (HP being a good case in point) you can, if you are prepared to search deep, download just the driver (gasp!) and then use it quite easily with your usual app, like photoshop elements etc.

Further research revealed things like “nero lite” that turns a 190Mb crapware fest into a sensible 20-30mb install. You have to be very dilligent as the article suggsts to bypass “easy install” and try and prune (where possible) as much crap as you can.

If you’re not a gamer, you should be extremely disciplined once you have your machine setup not to install anything else really. Sad, but true. You just cannot guarantee that uninstall really does what it says it will! I have a core set of apps (about a dozen) that I use, and that is all that is going on there. I suppose the use of something like vmware or virtualbox would allow you to establish just how much crapware was present before committing to your production / working machine.

By: pcernie

pcernie — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 23:20:35 +0000

I actually found the software that came with my Canon all in one works quite well – normally I wouldn’t be arsed with such software…

By: Greg

Greg — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 18:35:19 +0000

This really frustrates me – my HP printer has tons of useless addition programs installed.