I'm constantly stunned at the amount of junk that can be shoehorned into a PC even before the user gets to take it out of the box. What's even worse is the amount of junk that gets crammed in there under just about any pretext at all -- or, worse, under the pretext that if you don't have it installed, you're going to be horribly underinformed or suffer major losses of functionality. I'm referring specifically to annoying applications that sit in the system tray and bug you about things whether or not you ever asked to be informed about them.
Not long ago I installed a new printer from a major manufacturer. It proceeded to install a tray monitoring application which was not required for the printer to function, but did in fact bug me about every little thing that the printer did (even when it was manifestly obvious, like when the printer was out of paper). I had to do a little startup config to get rid of it. Ditto the stupid QuickTime icon, which has a habit of coming back no matter what I do (usually after an upgrade to QT's software).
Multiply my problem by a factor of five, and then multiply it again by all the people out there who don't clean up their PCs and don't see why they should motivate themselves to do so, and you have a good part of what can go wrong with software even when it's at its best. Nobody wants to become a computer expert just to make sure that a bunch of stupid little programs aren't all trying to load at once whenever they log in, thereby creating a delay of a minute or more on a particularly crowded system. I once watched with horror as someone's login process ballooned to over five minutes because they had so much of this stuff all trying to load itself.
Here is the problem: When I install a program, I do not want anything that does not absolutely have to be there. I don't need a tray monitoring (cr)applet for every single thing in my computer, and I don't want to have to do any jiggery-hackery to get rid of it. I want the option to not have such stuff installed as a standard option in the installer, like the installation directory or the "place an icon in the desktop" checkbox. Is that so much to ask?
"jiggery hackery" almost stumped Google.
"crappery hackery" Success!
"junkery hackery" Success!
Serdar,
You're absolutely right. Every time I setup a new machine, I've got to go in and spend time removing all the unnecessary startup applications. Microsoft really ought to provide an easier way to remove this stuff. There's autoruns and msconfig, but those are too complex for most end-users, and it's tough for these folks to tell what needs to be there and what doesn't.
"Ditto the stupid QuickTime icon, which has a habit of coming back no matter what I do (usually after an upgrade to QT's software)."
Agreed. This stuff drives me nuts. I hear you about the five-minute log-ins too. As for QuickTime, one contributing factor that is often overlooked is that all the QuickTime shortcuts point to the QuickTime installer, not QuickTime.exe. So, if you make some change like removing the registry value that runs the QuickTime tray app, it's right back the next time you run or upgrade. It probably comes back with an upgrade in any event.
I've taken to creating shortcuts that point to QuickTime.exe, placing them somewhere other than the default location, and then removing the defaults. That way, when an upgrade becomes necessary, I can quickly delete the default shortcuts (the ones pointing to the installer, again).
I've also written a bat file that removes the unbelievable amount of excess stuff that QuickTime writes to the registry (along with deleting some unnecessary files). Most of this entails international language support. Apparently, they're too lazy to create language-specific distributions.
If you're interested in the QuickTime cleanup bat file, drop me a line.