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Samsung: The Crapware Con

Posted on 29 Oct 2009 at 14:31

Samsung’s software suite is remarkably light. Whereas other machines trundled out of the starting blocks like a pensioner with a shopping trolley, our test R560 felt clean and unspoilt by pointless applications.

The few applications that were included weren’t particularly impressive, however. Play AVStation is a bog-standard movie and music playback tool, while Samsung Magic Doctor promises to fix any PC problems and then recover your system should anything go wrong.

Samsung’s software isn’t up to the calibre of that included with the Lenovo ThinkPad, for instance, or the Dell.

Nevertheless, Samsung’s reluctance to install crapware meant that its impact on laptop performance was minimal, with a boot time of one-and-a-half minutes and identical scores in our 2D benchmarks with and without crapware running.

Our test laptop also had hardly any hard disk space taken up by extra software: 442MB is far less than the 2.18GB of the HP Pavilion or 3GB used by the Dell. The memory footprint wasn’t too bad, either, with three other machines proving greedier.

If you’re looking for a laptop that doesn’t need a spring clean the moment you take it out of the polystyrene, Samsung (along with Acer), is an excellent choice.

Rating: 5/6

(Model tested: R560)

(Illustrations by Lee Hasler)

Author: Mike Jennings