Thought it’s only you who felt the need to lose weight after last night’s McDonald’s happy meal? Your computer feels the same way, but for different reasons.

We’d like to introduce you to another new tech term – bloatware.

Manufacturers, such as Dell or Lenovo, install unnecessary software along with Windows on their PCs.

This includes trial antivirus packages or nagware which mostly runs when you boot your pc and therefore slows down it’s performance dramatically. Manufacturers are in some cases paid to include software in this way.

Most users only need a small amount of the software loaded on their systems and regard the rest as unnecessary bloat.

A second variation of software bloat occurs when successive versions of a computer programme becomes slower and slower, using more memory or processing power. Your pc might suddenly also have higher hardware requirements than before.

Part of the problem is caused by unwanted and unused software that stays on the PC after initial installation. Even though programmes are uninstalled, some data remains. Over time this unnecessary software not only takes up space on the hard drive, but also uses valuable memory and wastes processing time, causing start up and shut down delays.

Apple iTunes and Microsoft Windows have both been accused of being culprits. Windows 8 has started to address the problem by adding options that allow users to reset and refresh PC’s, but bloatware remains a big problem for Windows PCs. Most PCs sold with Windows still come with added unnecessary software adding clutter and making your computer sluggish.

[SOURCE: www.wikipedia.org & www.howtogeek.com]

This entry was posted on Friday, November 15th, 2013 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.