Building up to the new financial year, many businesses will take stock of their IT solutions, look at what needs upgrading and work with their IT support partners in order to create an easy, seamless transition to a new and improved set of tools.
In theory, this should make your laptops, tablets and work phones faster, which reduces delays and improves productivity. In practice, however, some companies report the opposite, with new computers being unusually slow or filled with unwanted or unnecessary programs and features.
This is collectively known as software bloat or bloatware, and it can be incredibly frustrating to put up with and time-consuming to fix without help from tech support experts.
Why does bloatware exist? Why is it so annoying to remove? And does it always matter if you do?
What Is Computer Bloat?
Software bloat, commonly known by the shorthand bloatware, is any unnecessary program, feature or tool that is included with your chosen application or system that ends up making it less efficient to use, slower and more frustrating.
It is sometimes known as software cruft, a broader term used for software detritus that is redundant, left over, inefficient or gets in the way of a streamlined user experience.
Bloat includes features that are unnecessary, outdated or slow, programs and functions that have narrow, limited or nonexistent functionality, or inefficiencies at the coding level that make computer files bigger and slower to run.
It is often pre-installed with new computers or provided with installation media, but it can also be included with online software updates, something that is particularly common with Windows 11 and Microsoft 365.
What Are Some Examples Of Bloatware?
- Microsoft Copilot, a large language model bundled with Windows 11, slows down a lot of computers that run it and can be difficult to remove.
- Free limited-time trials of applications, such as antivirus software, document editing tools and video editors.
- Games, which are a particularly egregious issue with business machines designed for productivity.
- Applications for subscription-based services such as Amazon Prime, Netflix and Spotify.
- Software and features with extremely narrow and limited uses that are bundled with a system.
- Widgets, such as news and weather updates, overlay bars and desktop gadgets with little productive use.
Why Is Bloatware A Problem?
In some cases, people may not see the problem. In some cases, these new features and tools can be helpful, or at least are not obtrusive enough to cause problems. Every company and every user will use the same application slightly differently.
Where it can cause problems, however, is when they cause a computer to slow down in a way that you notice. It can also increase the wear on hardware components and take up disk space.
Bloatware tends to not only be pre-installed but also launch when the computer is turned on, meaning that it takes longer for your computer to be ready to work and can create delays as employees have to spend some time closing a number of annoying pop-ups, adverts and tools they will not need to use.
This can add up, not only in terms of lost time but also in terms of user frustration, which can affect productivity and even morale in some cases if it contributes to a poor overall workflow.
Why Is Bloatware Included With New Computers?
Most consumer-grade hardware is filled with bloat, both unintentionally and intentionally.
Unintentional bloat is often the result of compromises and coding issues that are typically the result of inefficient development practices to make an application quicker to develop, or a focus on added features rather than an efficient core product.
There is an assumption that because modern computers have so much processing power and memory, this does not matter, but inefficient software is causing computers to run slower through inefficiency than hardware can catch up through technological advancements, a concept known as Wirth’s Law.
Intentional bloat is often the result of software installed by Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) as a result of deals between them and software publishers to increase the market share of certain tools.
Do You Need IT Support Teams To Get Rid Of Bloatware?
In some cases, obvious bloatware can be removed without help from individual systems, but managed IT resources should only be tweaked by dedicated tech support teams in order to avoid inadvertently removing software the computer is dependent on to run correctly.
In some cases, bloatware is a feature of software that cannot be removed, but there can sometimes be ways to change the application’s settings to remove it or minimise its effect on system performance.