By Kurt Seifried (kurt@seifried.org)

This is one of those things that we have all experienced, but like the back of our own knee we don’t have a specific word to call it.

Imagine, that smell, long chain polymers and cardboard, as you unpack your new machine from a major vendor. You turn it on excitedly and … it boots. Slowly. Really slowly. You finally get in and excitedly try to configure the wireless or wired networking and.. it doesn’t work quite right. Hrmm. But there does seem to be a (for example) “Toshiba network setup assistant” which looks hopeful. Except it isn’t, like a lot of preloaded software on new machines it’s a half-baked effort at making something corporate-branded that replaces a Windows tool (that may not be perfect but at least it’s commonly used and has documentation, and a support line!). Well at least once you get through all that you can start using your computer. Well once you remove all the preloaded junk that is running and sucking up a few hundred megabytes of system memory.

Well the good news is that Microsoft Corp. seems to be in agreement with end consumers about these programs. The bad news is that they can’t really do much about it (remember that pesky monopoly lawsuit in the US?). The really bad news is that most OEMs make money off of the preloaded junk from companies such as AOL, Compuserve, Norton, McAfee, and so on. Oh and there’s a third piece of (really) bad news. Many of these applications are incompatible with Windows Vista.

Another reason to use your own master image.

Original article here

Two tools to help you remove this stuff: The PC Decrapifier and AutoRuns for Windows v8.54