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It All Bogs Down

For this story, we looked at an assortment of laptops and desktops from Acer, Alienware, Dell, eMachines, Fujitsu, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Polywell, Sony, and Toshiba (for space reasons, we put only ten on our "Cluttered Computers" chart; we left out the Mac because we had no WorldBench 6 score to use in determining its junk rating).

Unfortunately, our tests showed that gunk can impose a performance penalty. The primary culprits: hidden services and "helpful" tools, which can be part of trialware installations or not-so-helpful utilities from PC vendors.

As shipped, nearly all of the 15 PCs we tested had more than 80 processes--tasks from the OS or from applications--running. After we disabled all of the nonessential junk on each test machine, the number of processes dropped to the mid-thirties. Each process uses memory and system resources, and even if not actively performing a task, requires periodic attention from the operating system.

To measure shovelware's impact on performance, we ran WorldBench 6 Beta 2 on each system, first with the shipping software intact (sans antivirus software, because it often interferes with WorldBench; this is the way we test for our ranked reviews charts), and then again after using the Windows System Configuration Utility (msconfig.exe) to disable all startup items and non-Microsoft services.

The most dramatic changes we saw: The HP Pavilion notebook's WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score rose by 8.2 percent (we generally find that gains of 5 percent or more translate to a perceptible difference for normal business tasks), and the Acer Aspire notebook's score improved by 6.5 percent. Notebooks from Lenovo and Toshiba exhibited the lowest gains.

Desktop models showed far more consistent improvement, averaging a gain of 4 percent overall. In addition, our subjective impressions were that boot-up and program launch times improved noticeably, especially on slower systems.

Apple's Better Behavior?

Apple's "Stuffed" ad features an actor in a fat suit representing an overloaded PC facing off against a slim, hip youngster claiming that Macs "only come with the stuff you need." Sure enough, when we booted up a new 24-inch iMac, we saw only the registration/configuration wizard and a pristine desktop.

Even so, we found an icon for a 60-day trial of Apple's .Mac online services on the Dock (the bar of icons on a Mac screen), and a Microsoft Office 2004 test-drive and a 30-day trial for Apple's own iWork in the Applications folder.

Though the iMac does harbor marketing material, it offers less gunk than the average Vista desktop does--and the add-ons are more graciously presented.