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Windows 7: How Slow Can You Go?

pcworld.com — According to a PC Pro report, third-party crudware made the slowest PCs take more than twice as long to boot up as the fastest ones.

Who dugg this? Made popular 28 days ago

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  • badqat, on 10/31/2009, -3/+47It seems no matter what product you buy, it'll be loaded and laden with bloat and crap (crudware) at the start.
  • MtheoryX, on 10/31/2009, -2/+32Lets take a look at this... you can get super cheap PCs, with very little support, very low end, from Walmart or Dell or whatever.

    But why is it so cheap? Well, part of the cost is subsidized by all this bloatware they put on the machines.

    So, I suppose, you get what you pay for, end of story. If you're technically able to either remove the *****, or just reformat and reinstall windows, you might actually get a decent deal.
  • nofrickenway, on 10/31/2009, -0/+28Insightful....
    I just told someone yet again the other day that the most important thing to make your PC run faster is getting rid of programs running in the background. It seems everyone who gets a computer has 13 toolbars, Chrome, weather, etc etc etc. running in the background and then can't figure out why it runs so slow. You click the little expander arrow next to the clock and the start button disappears.


    "I got a virus, I got a virus" no, YOU are the virus. It's amazing that old people are afraid that they will accidentally delete everything, when in truth they always kill the performance by adding things. Is that irony, or Alanis?
  • Frixionburne, on 10/31/2009, -2/+19Oddly enough, the best way to get stripped down OS's is to steal them.

    Go go gadget bittorrent.
  • Willow01, on 10/31/2009, -16/+30Sure they do it's called OSX
  • rolf, on 10/31/2009, -2/+14Why is seltae4 being buried? He's right. I'm not sure if Dell's Ubuntu comes with crapware (if Dell infested it yet), but it's generally up to the hardware manufacturer, not the OS maker. Apple has the luxury of being both in this case.

    If it really bother MS though, they could probably make it part of their licensing agreement with OEMs "Thou shalt not ship with 3rd party apps installed" or some such, or have an approval list of "good" software. But it'll be complicated as some stuff is actually useful.

    I just remember buying an Acer last year, and it was the most bogged down PoS out-of-the-box I ever encountered, I don't know why they do that as it gives the brand a bad name. I say the least worst brand is Medion, available from Aldi time to time.
  • ghostborg, on 10/31/2009, -1/+11What do you mean?
    Dell is a brand of computer.
    Vista is an operating system.
    So what OS did you have on the Dell?
  • TekTrixter, on 10/31/2009, -0/+9In my experience it is easier to format the drive and install a fresh copy of Windows then it is to try to remove all the crap that comes preinstalled.
  • badqat, on 10/31/2009, -3/+11Or you can do what I'm getting ready to do with a Dell Mini 10V...load up OS X Snow Leopard on it and have a Mac netbook on the cheap.
  • TonyTheTerrible, on 10/31/2009, -2/+10this isnt even an article. buried
  • PCMichiana, on 10/31/2009, -1/+9Agreed
  • richo123, on 10/31/2009, -3/+10Neither does Linux. Moreover all that software is completely free.
  • doshindude, on 10/31/2009, -1/+8Always, ALWAYS do a clean reinstall upon buying a PC. Guaranteed you will see a 200% speed increase.
  • sputnikv, on 10/31/2009, -0/+7by the same time, they can charge you to remove said junk if you configure some of these things online. it almost reminds me of when you had to pay more to downgrade to xp when vista was the configuration standard a year or two ago
  • rolf, on 10/31/2009, -0/+7This isnt so easy anymore when OS disks aren't being given out with a new PC, rather just "System Reinstall" disks that also reinstall the entire bloat/crapware. When I last bought an Acer with Vista, I ran into this, and it took me over an hour just to uninstall the crap because AFAIK Windows makes you unstall things one by one instead of checking everything you want uninstalled at once. Uninstalling doesn't really leave your computer as clean as never-installed-in-the-first-place. Some programs also refuse to uninstall as well.

    Without major registry hacking few people understand, the only other options at that point is to buy Windows again (too much $$$), "borrow" Windows from a friend or off the net, or install Linux.
  • inactive, on 10/31/2009, -1/+7I upgraded from Apple it is WAY quicker than Leopard.
  • yacks, on 10/31/2009, -2/+8or buy the oem version...
  • KibibyteBrain, on 10/31/2009, -1/+7@richo123 But thats the issue. The price of Windows on a shipping machine is often totally negated and then some by vendors giving the OEMs money to ship those trial versions of product on their big-box bound PCs. If this allows OEMs to actually make money on shipping a non-free OS, I can't believe that if Linux started to gain any significant share OEMs wouldn't gladly accept offers to ship crapware on Linux Distros as well and make 100% profit on it...
    Also, while Apple's business model is quite different from the PC world and so they don't need to ship crapware on their products(they just charge a bit extra, only ship midrange and above, and make both the OEM cut and the software vendor cut too), they do obviously include a ton of software on their machines out of the box geared up to make them more money. Have you never had .Mac bug you about signing up for features you can get for free with other tools? Never had iTunes force you to make an account for basic things like DLing album art? Had iPhoto happily solicit its ability to print out a photo calendar for you for a few bucks?
  • jordanlgta, on 10/31/2009, -3/+8I hate people that don't know how to properly use a computer. That's right I used the word hate. What?

    I hate them because they constantly pester me to help them. I'm done with that.
  • nofrickenway, on 10/31/2009, -0/+4Probably got a PC recently and did the "free upgrade" from vista to Win7..... from dell.
  • pika2000, on 10/31/2009, -0/+4IMO HP is the worst offender. Not only they don't offer option to NOT to include the crapware, they don't even give you an actual Windows DVD. You have to make your own restore DVD from a hidden partition. Talk about a cheap company.
    Dell seems to be the better one. They ship an actual Windows DVD with all their PCs, and depending on the options, you can choose to build an almost clean system from the get-go.
  • scuba7183, on 10/31/2009, -0/+4Charge them.
  • fxu1989, on 10/31/2009, -1/+4You mean to tell me that slow PCs load slower than faster PCs?

    Well no *****.
  • MWeather, on 10/31/2009, -2/+5We already did. It came with our PC along with a ton of crapware. Why should we buy it twice?
  • Ignitedude, on 10/31/2009, -0/+2I remember when I first purchased my Dell. The amount of bloatware that came pre-installed was absolutely ridiculous.
  • edwarddouglas, on 10/31/2009, -0/+2I hate crapware myself but if it wasn't included, the price of a dell or hp would go up. Buy from an independent pc maker if you can.
  • EmperorAwesome, on 10/31/2009, -0/+1Even if Dell was an OS wouldn't that still be "to Dell"?
  • DariusMonsef, on 10/31/2009, -4/+5Ummm. "Thanks to such apps, the slowest PCs took more than twice as long to boot up as the fastest ones..."
    So the slowest PCs boot slower than the fastest ones do? Genius insight.
  • xBloodSplatter, on 10/31/2009, -0/+1well just wait for it to boot up and then uininstall the crap or go into msconfig and turn them all off at startup. mostly the problem is solved.
  • Dougman82, on 10/31/2009, -0/+1But I don't get why all the crapware can't just be optional installs. I have seen store-bought systems before where there was a shortcut on the desktop for some trial version piece of ***** software - and when you click on it, it starts installing that trial version. Why does anything have to be preinstalled? Just add these optional installs and leave it to the user to decide what to use.
  • tehhowch, on 10/31/2009, -1/+2This review is horribly arranged... not a single "Next" link? Come on!
  • inactive, on 10/31/2009, -0/+1Technically able? Don't you just go to programs and uninstall the software?
  • Black6x, on 10/31/2009, -0/+1The things is, the people who are buying their computers in this condition probably have no idea what they should install, or how they install it. The more computer-savvy individuals will have an easier time removing teh crap then them.

    The first thing I do is get all of my programs set up the way I like them, and remove the crap extras. Then, I make a backup of that state and call it a baseline.
  • majortom1981, on 10/31/2009, -0/+1How long ago was this. When you configure a dell you can opt to remove the junk when yo uconfigure the machien on dells website.

    PS dells OS install disk is just the OS no junk on it.
  • Warom, on 10/31/2009, -1/+2By default computers should come with no crapware or hardware programs, instead it should be a clean Windows install with only the drivers installed (so no ATI CCC, Synaptics Touchpad settings program, Via Audio utilies etc), then simply include all the utilities on a disk and put a small guide to installing them if users want to.
  • CowGoesMooo, on 10/31/2009, -0/+1Better yet, build your own if you can. Or buy the components and solicit someone to build it for you.
  • WoollyMittens, on 10/31/2009, -0/+1That doesn't remove the half of it.
  • gbudavid, on 10/31/2009, -0/+1Bingo
  • CowGoesMooo, on 10/31/2009, -0/+1Acer is pretty bad too, they install all their "Empowering Technology" stuff, which really gets my goat because they're all much slower alternatives to the generic Windows drivers which work perfectly fine! Not to mention the Wi-Fi thing has a habit of competing with Windows and starts connecting itself to your neighbours unsecured network before you can get rid of it.
  • KibibyteBrain, on 10/31/2009, -0/+1Geekbench is not a real world benchmark. Application benchmarks are important. Few apps use bare-metal type system features to math or draw to the screen, they are programmed using .net or ObjectiveC, or they use high level libraries like WPF or Cocoa. This makes comparing real world application performance almost necessarily an apples to oranges task. Some real world benchmarks are quite practical however, like seeing how long it takes to run your python script or to emit html for your webapp if these are the tasks you are going to do no matter what.
    Its also a Mac benchmarking tool that has been ported. I maintain it is impossible to make a cross-platform benchmark for low level performance because the way you optimally do thing like spawn processes or interact with memory on different operating systems is almost always totally different using the native API even when there are common interfaces. Using programming paradigms for fast code on one OS usually won't work on another very well at all. Plus, OSes work with totally different primitive objects internally and so some tasks that might be really simple on one OS might be very complex on another and vice versa.
  • EmperorAwesome, on 10/31/2009, -0/+1Without exaggeration, if I had a nickel for every time someone asked me what the "control panel" was I'd be able to build a new high-end PC right now.
  • Wang, on 10/31/2009, -0/+1The title of this article suggested it was an anti-Windows 7 article, and yet the article itself is positive and shows what Microsoft is doing to help strip crudware from PC's. Not sure if it was deliberate or not...I guess a negative MS title always gets more views ;)
  • Propethic, on 10/31/2009, -2/+2Why do you need to reformat? Have we gotten to the point where pre-installed crap automatically attaches itself to every copy of windows on the machine?
  • fuzzynyanko, on 10/31/2009, -2/+2I remember looking at some "elite PC user" work computer, and man was it slow. It had all sorts of "free" programs on it. After taking half of them off, it became nice and responsive.
  • PhillyMJS, on 10/31/2009, -4/+4Yeah, and Snow Leopard is faster than Windows 7 even without crapware. I just built a Hackintosh (2.83GHz quad, 8GB RAM) and ran some Geekbench tests on it. Mac OS X 10.6.1 scored 6376, a fully-updated Windows 7 install scored 5123. One day when I have time I'm gonna put Vista and XP on it and run Geekbench on those to see how they fare.
  • gbudavid, on 10/31/2009, -14/+13I upgraded from Dell It is WAY quicker than Vista.
  • Hellicus, on 10/31/2009, -5/+4BREAKING: Old PCs boot slower than new PCs.

    *****' buried.
  • seltaeb4, on 10/31/2009, -21/+17Macs don't come with bloat and crapware.
  • Shar3Mor3, on 10/31/2009, -13/+1Wooo Hoooo Yet another Wondeful Windows Wild in the World weeeeeeee www

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