Fed up with f… bloatware ?

Be warned, this is another one of my rant posts. Rude words can be expected.

Fed up with fucking bloatware? Well I for one is really tired of all the fucking bloatware that manufacturers install on their devices before shipping them. It is sooo tiresome to have to spend hours to clean up your new device the first thing you do. And sometimes the manufacturers try to prevent you from removing their crap as well!

I recently got myself a Asus T101 tablet as a replacement for my old Acer W510 one that I used as an office and travel tablet. The 10″ form factor of the W510 and the T101 is perfect for me in a tablet that really travels whether that is on a real voyage or to and from work or just between my office and some meeting room. Actually my old Acer was doing very well up until Windows 10. It was quite fast and slick to use. Then came Windows 10 and it slowed to a crawl. It really became unusable. Well, there was not much I could do about it except for ranting so I finally took a bite out of the shit sandwich that Microsoft had made for me and got myself a new and faster model.

That brings us to the reason for this post. Now I should perhaps point out that almost every manufacture are guilty of stuffing the devices full of bloatware, not just Asus. They are just unlucky in that the last device I bought came from them. Having said that my Surface 3 Pro was refreshingly free from bloatware.

Anyway, when I first got the tablet up and running it was, of course, completely loaded with bloatware that at best is wasting memory and at worst screws things up. There was of course the usual culprits like home cooked photo viewers, Asus advisors, junk games etc.

There was also a bunch of actually useful apps. That is, they could have been useful if I had wanted them in the first place. If I want another antivirus software then it is me that decide to install it and not whoever supplied me with the hardware. Especially not software that starts to ask for payments after a few months! In addition the built in antivirus software of Windows 10 has scored better than most, if not all, other software so I actually risk being less protected with whatever software the manufacturer tries to force onto me.

Another app that could be useful would be Dropbox. Again that is if I wanted Dropbox in the first place. This is Microsoft Windows for Christ sake. You already have cloud storage to begin with. If I wanted another provider it is, again, me that decides to install it. On top of everything Asus also installed their own bloody cloud service. Three different cloud services pre-installed. What the fuck?

I can go on for a long time about all the useless and unwanted crap that was installed. It took me hours to remove all the crap. Some could be uninstalled from Windows 10’s app list and some I had to go into the old fashioned Programs and Features control panel applet to get rid of. Luckily Asus had not installed any un-installable pieces of crapware so I could get rid of everything.

The one “feature” that really got me worked up was that Asus installed their own updater. I thought I had made all the settings for Windows update as well as stores updates when this piece of shit suddenly popped up and told me that I had updates and that it really, really wanted to install them automatically for me. Get lost Asus! The last thing I want is some shitware that interferes with the update process, especially not a naggy one.

Hello, Earth to device manufacturers! Most people do not want your crap installed. If you feel compelled to install your shit then users should at least have the option to opt out when the OS is first set up on the device.