I said YES to every Bloatware Pop-up

Do you know where your RAM is right now? You might think it's just working late at the office, but the truth is it's cheating on you with bloatware you didn't even install. And in a world where RAM is so precious, I and Threat Locker, who sponsored this video, think you deserve to know how much your systems pre-installed craps, excuse me, apps are impacting your performance. To find out, we bought a brand new Dell Tower Plus desktop and tested it three different ways. Once with the outofthe-box bloat, once with a cleaned up install, and to make things interesting, we said yes to every single offer for value added software that we could find in an hour. McAfee, don't mind if I do. Razer Synapse sounds smart to me. Well, maybe not that smart with just 16 gigs of system memory, but we'll get to that later. First, let's establish a baseline by comparing our factory bloated Dell against itself after cleaning up our unwanted apps. Note that neither of these is completely clean since Adobe Creative Cloud and Steam are part of our benchmark suite. Also, it's important to note that this is more of an ad hoc test and if you want us to dive deeper, let us know and maybe Labs will do a write up in the future. Diving into our results, employees of Dell, you can breathe a sigh of relief. We do see a slight consistent drop in performance across most of our synthetic and productivity benchmarks, but it's nothing that I would worry about. And as for gaming, in Cyberpunk, we saw no measurable difference in performance in any of our test conditions. But that doesn't mean that there was no impact. For power consumption, we saw a 7% jump at idle, meaning the system is drawing an extra 2 1/2 watts all the time that it's on. And there are aspects of the experience that aren't captured by our benchmarks that are a little worse. For example, our bloat configuration takes about an additional 30 seconds to fully boot. And then there's just the little nuisances like moving past an extra icon in the system tray and waiting for McAfee to approve everything that I do. Which raises a really big question for me. Why would anyone go out of their way to create a worse customer experience for their product, even if it is just two and a half watts? and a bit of extra mouse movement. It's like if I personally went into the package of every super soft hoodie and made it just a little less soft, which I would never do. So, get yours at ltctore.com. As always, the answer is money, but it's also a bit more nuanced than that. See, bloatware didn't start as a bad thing. I know, right? Back in the early 90s, when internet speeds were measured in megabits per hour, having software that was preloaded on a new PC was actually kind of convenient. OEMs even used included software as a way of differentiating themselves from their competition. But, as tends to happen over time, fully functional programs were replaced by trial wear that was begging you to buy it. And then by the 2000s, you weren't so much buying a computer as you were buying an ad delivery system. But why though? It's the classic race to zero mentality that keeps PC margins slim for any computer company that isn't named Apple. So, in order to boost their margins, PC makers took what used to provide extra value for their customers and weaponized it to shore up their profits. By how much? It's hard for us to say exactly, but we do have one data point. Back in 2008, InfoWorld reported that Sony had introduced a fresh start option that would ditch any of the pre-installed junk. The cost of the consumer, 50 bucks, and that was on top of a mandatory $100 upgrade to Windows Vista Business. Now, I don't know if they would get the same rates today, but what's clear is that these bloatware add-ons clearly pay more than just pocket change. And that kind of makes sense when you consider how much bloatware is designed to sell you additional bloat or even sell you a recurring subscription. Now, let's move on from our factory bloat and prepare our system for use by installing some common useful apps, but not the savvy way with Windet, the bloy. Now, to be clear, not every installer is packed with crap. Firefox went pretty well. But then almost immediately, Dell's one sin. McAfee did the thing, practically begging me to protect my digital life with web advisor. Sounds horrible. And Threat Locker agrees. Thanks, Threat Locker. Blocking that would be nice. But unfortunately, I have to say yes today. Um, uh, okay. I don't really see anything happening, but I guess McAfee has my digital back now. All right, I'm not going to bore you guys with the details of 24 more app installs. So, with the magic of editing, we're just going to speed through them here, but I'll stop along the way if anything interesting happens. Heat. Heat. Oh, here's one. Fan control requires Microsoft's.net framework to be installed or updated, but it's not really bloatware in the traditional sense. Oh yikes. While installing CC Cleaner, I got my first popup asking me to install what I would consider to be true bloware. To be clear, a vast antivirus isn't known to be the worst option. But on top of Windows Defender, I already have McAfee from Dell. And you might have heard this lines tech tip before, but it is not considered best practice to have multiple real-time malware monitoring suites running at the same time. What do I do with the prompt then? Well, the rules are clear. Oh my god. Hell. Now, at this point, I was thinking I could keep going with more software, but we got to draw the line somewhere. And these 25 apps took about an hour to install, turning our downloads and programs folders into haunted mazes of despair. As for our system tray, we're going to need a second monitor just to see all the icons. Now, let's see how much this all impacts our system performance. Ha, nice. We finally see our first noticeable drop. We're looking at anywhere from two to eight% worse than our clean system, which still might not sound like that much, but these minor slowdowns can add up over the course of a project. And if you like to turn your computer off at the end of the day to avoid idle power draw, you just added over half a minute to your boot time again. Oh, and on the subject of idle power draw, we crept up by another one watt on average. Still not that much over base, but again, this stuff can add up. Fortunately for the gamers out there, we still don't see any impact on our gaming performance. Unfortunately for the gamers though, we've yet to even touch the worst category of system bloatware. The applications that come with RGB lighting and with gaming peripherals. This is where our say yes to anything test is going to get kind of nasty. Immediately after plugging in their keyboard, MSI prompts us for their driver utility installer. Okay, we say yes. Then we get installers for Dropbox Redeem Launcher, MSI Center, Voice Mod, and Norton 360. Well, I guess I'll install them all except Norton because I actually see an icon on my desktop for that already. I don't know when that sneaked in, but that's a perfect example of the kind of thing that Threat Locker would have prevented. More on them later. For now, it's time to deck out my system with a mishmash of peripherally transmitted infections. The included software for many of these products are notorious for being resource hogs, and that completely ignores any extras that might come along for the ride. Looking at you, Norton. Oh, good lordy. A popup for Norton 360 for gamers just showed up in my notifications while I was installing Aura Creator. I have to say yes. So now I have McAfee, Avast, Malware Bytes, Norton 360, and Norton 360 for gamers, which all sit on top of Microsoft's own defender. I can't imagine anything going wrong with that holy sex tet. Then at virtually the same time, Armory Crate popped up offering me some additional features like playground assistant and content service. Well, who could resist playground and those other things? Man, this was bound to happen sooner or later. And I'm totally not surprised it was Armory Crate, but this is the first time that we got prompted for a system restart. And then almost immediately, Corsair's IQ also required a reboot. After another hour, we managed to get eight peripherals, not to mention their parasites, finally installed. And this is where things start to get a little sluggish. Let's have a look at the lab's test report. And oh lordy, it's proper boys. Adding all this extra bloat has caused our performance to drop by nearly 16% in some of our benchmarks. That's like equivalent to a CPU downgrade. At best, we see a 6 and 12% decrease in performance in some of our productivity and synthetic workloads. This is gnarly. And the performance hit is finally rearing its ugly head in gaming. Even again, very ironic. Okay, it's not nearly as much as in the more CPU dependent workloads, but at 1440p, we're losing nearly 10% in our 1% lows. As for Cyberpunk with ray tracing, the bloatware caused horrific frame pacing issues that cut our 1% lows in half. So, if you install every utility that comes with your gaming hardware and you don't happen to buy them all within the same ecosystem, you could be paying a serious price. Literally at this point, we found that our system had gone from idling at 38 watts to 61 watts. That is a 60% increase in idle power consumption. All for your computer to do nothing. And if you want to save power by turning your computer off, lucky you. You just get to wait nearly 4 minutes to turn your PC on. Just imagine how much worse this would have been with a laptop. Those have even more factory bloat than desktops from our experience. Now, for our last test, we uninstalled all the bloatware and fired up Threat Locker, who sponsored this video. I mean, this was pretty important because if the cure is worse than the disease, we wouldn't really want to promote it, right? So, it's kind of a risky play, but Threat Locker was confident that not only would their software prevent unwanted installs, but it would have a minimal impact on system performance. And looking at these bootup times, we've got good news for Threat Locker. There is no appreciable difference when it's added to a system. Okay. Hey, hi. It's me, Adam. Idle power draw. Threat Locker does have an appreciable increase over the non-bloated condition, but it's still much less than if you had a bunch of gaming blowware on there. So, as for our productivity tests, Threat Locker has negligible effects while providing all of its benefits. And if any apps did try to do something that they weren't supposed to, Threat Locker's ring fencing would spring into action and put a quick halt to it. Meanwhile, for gaming, there's no big performance hits running Threat Locker, but it is worth noting they are there. Now, while CIS admins would normally block game installations, hey, one man's bloat could be another man's most important piece of software. That's where Threat Locker's learning mode comes in. It scans your computer to find the software that your organization uses and automatically allow lists those pieces of software to minimize the impact on your team's productivity. And if they do need to install something new, Threat Locker's elevation control allows a user temporary time-based elevation privileges without just giving the user the keys to the kingdom. Anyway, this whole exercise goes to show that you've got to pay attention before mindlessly installing software and keep an eye on your system tray for programs that just plain don't need to be running in the background. Also, if you like RGB stuff, maybe consider a unifying control program like OpenRGB so you can at least minimize the overhead. Finally, another thing to consider would be threat locker for your organization's needs. Most of the users watching this channel are going to know how to unselect bloatware. But if you're an administrator, you know that you have people who behave exactly like we did today and just say yes to everything. And threat locker is a great way to keep their systems clean, performant, and secure. If you guys enjoyed this video, check out the one we did on how to set up Windows properly. will help you avoid a lot of the bloatware prompts in the first