I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – computers are complicated, even for folks like me who are in the business. With that in mind, Best Buy has discovered another way to mint money – charging folks a small premium to remove the bloatware that the major computer makers install on their computers.
While some of the software can be considered useful or helpful, what I’ve found is that I rarely use it, and so much of it runs as an always-on service that uses some amount of additional hardware resources. It all adds up.
Users typically hate this stuff (at least once they discover it), and vendors are coming around to discover this. Take for example, Sony who already charges folks a premium to ship their Vaio laptops without the ‘extra-ware’.
BTW, if you would rather do it yourself and save some $, just do a search for something along the lines of ‘remove bloatware‘ – you’ll find dozens of articles and forum posts on how to do so. Throw your vendor name into the search for more pinpointed results.