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Virtually all Windows PCs contain crapware, the software added to PCs before shipment which includes demos, trials, offers, and the like. While Microsoft itself sees fit to put crapware-less (depending on your point of view) PCs in its retail stores, most OEMs are not so kind. Now a study has shown just how much "harm" these crapware installs do.

The study, performed by PC Pro, showed how much RAM is wasted by the crapware these OEMs install on their PCs, as well as how much slower your systems run because of them.

The report compared "clean" systems vs. normally "loaded" (with crapware) systems, from a number of manufacturers. Some interesting results: the Acer and Sony systems, when compared with clean versions, took about 2 extra minutes to boot. Since slow booting is one of the frequently complaints of Windows systems (which is why SSDs and "stand by" or "Sleep" are loved).

The HP system's boot time more than doubled with its crapware installed. Its 2D benchmark score dropped from 1.06 to 1.00 with all the extra junk installed. The Toshiba's boot time went from an impressive 39 seconds when clean to 2:13 with crapware installed, nearly a 4x change in boot times.

Common sense would say that none of this should be surprising: you can't have programs installed and running without affecting RAM and performance, even if only slightly. All the garbage installed such as this, adds up, however.

One thing to remember, however, is there are plenty of programs that install services and applets that run all the time, taking up memory and slowing performance even when not being used. An example: True Image installs services that are used for scheduled imaging. If you don't want to run automatic imaging, but rather just do so manually, it's a waste of RAM and CPU cycles.

There's also this program called “Apple Mobile Device Service”. You really don’t need it unless you have an iPhone or an iTouch iPod but that didn’t stop Apple from including it as an Service for all iTunes users. There's also "AppleSyncNotifier," which is something that is used for MobileMe. Once again, if you don't have MobileMe, why do you need this as well.

Whenever I install any software, I try to track the new stuff that is installed; you should, too. There's so much extra so that programs can run in the background, you'd be surprised how much is running without your knowledge.

Oh, and about that crapware? Don't expect it to go anywhere soon. Manufacturers seem perfectly happy to pay OEMs to install it on their PCs, so based on that, nothing's going to change anytime soon.