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This is the best way to get rid of crapware

January 27, 2008 | 10:15 am | Tags: windows

…at least if your new computer came with pre-installed Windows Vista. The other day I got a new HP laptop with Windows Vista Business. The laptop is great, the operating system itself is great too… but there’s one thing that completely ruins the user experience—crapware.

If you’re lucky enough and don’t know what crapware exactly is, check out this video featuring Tom Merritt. So how to get rid of it? Well, the first thing I did when I first saw those tons of useless trials, pre-installed programs, and drivers was trying to uninstall them. As soon as they got all uninstalled, the system still remained too slow and generally weird. CorelDRAW 12 kept crashing, the wireless network connection would always disconnect and I was like “Damn Vista. I should have stuck with the old good XP or 2000.” A few weeks later I found this blog post about replacing the manufacturer customized Vista with a clean installation. However, doing so usually requires spending some extra money (the fee depends on your location, I paid $7 in Europe but I guess that shipping within the U.S. is even cheaper) on the original “Windows Anytime Upgrade” DVD. But man, it’s definitely worth it. When I received the DVD, I made backups of all my data, formatted all the partitions, and started installing. I ended up saving about 10 gigs of hard drive space by removing the HP’s useless partition containing the original disk contents and other similar stuff. The system is now way faster, Wi-Fi finally works without random disconnecting, and surprisingly CorelDRAW 12 works fine too. If you keep getting mad about your computer being slow because of crapware and if you’re not too lazy to spend like one day making backups of your data, you should definitely check out the site I mentioned above. You won’t regret the effort.