August 23rd, 2004
Let's imagine for a moment that we are going to buy a new car.
We go to the dealership, wrestle with a smiling pig of a salesman, and eventually find a car that will satisfy our needs for the price we want to pay. We do the paperwork, then drive the car home.
And let's say that we notice the car isn't really performing all that well; the acceleration out of intersections isn't quite what we think it should be, and it even stalls the next day while we are taking it out for a serious test spin (but while obeying all posted speed limits and traffic laws, ahem). Every once in a while, for no discernible reason, we can't get it started the first time and have to wait and try again.
So what do we do? Well, we probably take it back to the dealership, don't we? We go straight to some moustachioed polyester-suited manager and tell him there's something wrong with the car we just bought.
Now let's imagine that this guy breezily replies, "Well, there are some options in the car that might be responsible: There's the ice-cube maker, the GPS Announcer to our Marketynge department (so they can know where to advertise to), the coffee-cup washer/sanitizer is pretty engine-intensive--especially when there's a lot of highway traffic, some people report problems with their bubble-maker ... [etc.] ... so that is probably why you are experiencing reduced performance. You can uninstall any of these if you want. There's a toolbox in the trunk."
Well, I don't know about you, but if that were true, it would really crease my cottons. But wait a minute: for computers, it really is true! When you go and buy a computer, it comes all preloaded down with tonnes of software crap that clutters up the hard drive, slows the CPU to a crawl, confuses the already fat operating system, and otherwise renders it next to useless.
Like, say, the HP/Compaq Presario laptop computer I bought a few weeks ago. It hasn't exactly been zipping along with the performance I thought it should. It's supposed to be the fastest machine I've ever had, but so far its performance has only been fair (in comparison to my old system bought four years ago).
So last night, I looked at all the services and load-at-boot-time software. I did an Internet search to determine what each component was, and whether it was strictly necessary. The result: Junk, and lots of it. There was so much HP- and Apple-centric rubbish (on a PC?) that had absolutely nothing to do with my needs, that the system was bogging down before it had even finished loading all its components.
Then I went apeshit removing references to about half of it in the registry. I think I deleted about twenty registry keys, then rebooted. And holy snapping arseholes, my computer just rocks, now! The difference is so palpable, that I am wondering what the hell HP was even thinking when they designed the software in the first place. I mean, an ice-cube maker in a car actually makes more sense than, for example, a service that constantly runs in the background just to check whether or not an HP printer is installed (on a laptop, no less!)
Why do they bother? Those people who don't know enough to find out and remove unnecessary components will merely look at their computer and complain that it is slow and crashes all the time. Is this really how manufacturers want to sell their computers?
It's bad enough that some software you install makes changes to your system--such as desktop and quick-launch icons, Start Menu items, and start-up registry entries that come back after I remove them. They force me to run around deleting crap (you know who you are Yahoo! Messer-Upper, Real Plaguer and Quick Slime). But to have my system, which I expect to be pristine and "factory standard" arrive with all of this CPU-hogging crud is unacceptable.
Addendum, August 26th: After a little more research and some experimentation, I have discovered that the biggest culprit in my computer's "death of a thousand cuts," by far, was Apple's iTunes. It made my Windows Media Player jumpy and sluggish, and my whole system somewhat unstable, particularly the related Service by Gear Software called Gearsec that is loaded at start-up. Thanks a lot, you MacPeople!