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>> I'm Rich DeMuro with CNETTV. Here today with another edition of Insider's Secrets, to tell you all about crapware. This is the bloat that fills up your brand new PC and my good friend Dan Ackerman is here today to tell us about it, what it is and most importantly, how to get rid of it. First things first. Let's get a great definition of crapware from Dan. What is it?
>> Well when you buy a new computer you spend 1000 dollars, 2000 dollars on it and you turn it on for the first time and you see all these icons on your desktop. It's all things they want you to buy. Anti-virus software, extended service plans. You don't need this stuff, they're just trying to sell ya things.
>> Just go through some of the various places we're seeing you know, crapware on this PC right now.
>> There's about nine or ten icons right here on the desktop when you start it up. You can, you can sign up for AOL, you can watch AOL video, you can buy an extended service plan from Sony.
>> And even this fancy background is really what? An ad masquerading as a background or what?
>> Well it turns out that Spiderman of course, is a Sony picture and this is a Sony laptop.
>> There you go.
>> So of course your laptop comes pre-loaded with a big Spiderman 3 background and there's even a link right here. It says, watch Spiderman. It comes with Spiderman and Spiderman 2, pre-loaded on the computer itself. But even though these files are already on your hard drive.
>> Taking up space.
>> Right, you've gotta pay to unlock them. They're actually, there you go, 9.99 to watch one of these movies.
>> So 10 dollars to watch something that's already sitting on your PC.
>> They're taking up about 3 gigs of hard drive space.
>> Okay.
>> And I also saw a couple links at the bottom here. Those, it says, Sony Entertainment or Vio Entertainment Center.
>> That sounds like fun.
>> Yeah. Let's find out what it is. Oh, there's.
>> Game Tap.
>> There's the Spiderman movies. There's Napster. There's some old arcade games. There's Wheel of Fortune. There's Qubert.
>> Qubert. We all loved Qubert.
>> 19.95 for Qubert.
>> 19.95. Okay.
>> 60 minute free trial though.
>> So a lot of times these are just really gateways to getting you to pay to unlock a bigger program.
>> That's right.
>> Okay.
>> They're either pre-loaded on the hard drive or they direct you to download them right there.
>> Let's find out how to get rid of some of the crapware on our brand new PC. Where do we wanna go first?
>> First thing I'd do is take a look at my system tray. This will show you a lot of the stuff that's active on the computer right now. I see Napster right here. I don't particularly need Napster running automatically. So I can just right click on that and quit Napster if I felt like it. The second place I'd go is right here in the Windows start menu. Go to the programs folder and go to the start up folder and that will show you some of the programs that are gonna start up automatically. Right here we've got some Adobe Acrobat stuff, that's okay. We're gonna leave that alone for now.
>> Okay, so if you find a program in there like Quickbooks start up.
>> That's right.
>> You wanna maybe take that out. If you don't use Quickbooks.
>> If you wanna go a level deeper, you go right into the run menu here and you type in MS Config. That pops up a window, you go right over to the start up tab and this will show you all the different programs and services that are starting up when your computer starts up. Most of these you wanna leave alone but if you see something that you don't like or you don't need like here you go, Quickbooks or Corel Photo, you just unclick it, you hit okay and next time you start up the computer, those programs will not start. Which means, your machine will start up faster and hopefully run a little better.
>> Okay, let's check out the programs and features.
>> You might be tempted to just take all these little icons here and just delete them, but that just gets rid of the icons. The programs are still there. To actually get rid of stuff, you go into your control panel. You go down to programs and features. And this shows you all the programs installed on your machine and you can pick one that you don't want. You see the Quickbooks Simple Start Free Starter Edition, that doesn't sound like it's gonna be very full featured to me. It doesn't sound like it's gonna be very useful. I can just click that, go up here, hit uninstall and that will uninstall that for me.
>> And let's, let's get rid of Spidey on the desktop.
>> Get rid of Spiderman. There we go. A nice, calm, relaxing Sony. Blue, it still says Vio. But that's okay, we bought a Vio, we like Vio.
>> Okay.
>> At least it's not an ad.
>> And real quick, let's get rid of the gnome.
>> Oh that's right.
>> Travelocity. You know, it's not like if you get rid of this guy you're never gonna travel again. You can just go to the you know, the travel website of your choice. So how do we get rid of him?
>> Go over to the Windows sidebar. If you just mouse over one of these widgets that they call them, this little X right here, hit the X and it's goodbye mister gnome.
>> Does every company do this?
>> HP's and Dell's and all these other systems, do come with a certain number of icons on them. Some companies like Dell actually give you a clean option. So that if you order certain systems, you can get them without all these icons on them.
>> And you don't really have to be afraid of ordering it clean, because pretty much anything that they're putting on there, you can download yourself. You can buy yourself. You're not gonna be you know, scrambling for a starter edition of Quickbooks you know, six months into your clean PC right?
>> Yeah, choose your own stuff.
>> Excellent advice Dan. So now we have seen how to get our new PC, you know, kind of customized to what we want and also take up less memory, less space on the hard drive and just have a computing experience that you've kind of controlled rather than having Sony control it for you.
>> Exactly.
>> All right. Dan Ackerman, thanks so much. I'm Rich DeMuro with CNETTV. This has been another Insider's Secret. Take care.
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