Long story short, my dad is getting a new computer and it will in short order become absolutely stuffed with various programs all running in the background, choking out his startup, eating his memory, etc.
I’d love to have a program that can run passively on his computer (yes, I know the irony here), audit the usage of these programs, and periodically recommend to him that certain ones should be deleted or removed from the startup list. Preferably with metrics justifying the recommendation. Something like, “you haven’t used this program in two weeks, but it has high impact on startup and utilizes 13% of available memory.”
Pops isn’t computer illiterate by any means. Just a guy who programmed on punched cards back in the day and will probably never stop being delighted by all the information he can have at his fingertips.
Does a program like this exists? If not, it’s my idea and I would appreciate you erasing this post from your memory.
Why would having a few zillion programs installed on one’s hard drive cause them to be running in the background?
If your Dad’s the kind of person who launches programs and leaves them minimized and never reboots the computer, that, and not his tendency to install a zillion programs, is the behavior that should be targeted.
Also, you’re inconsistent, or there’s something I’m fundamentally missing:
Again, if the program hasn’t been used in two weeks, why should it have any appreciable impact on startup or available memory?
Okay, a small handful of my applications do install something that launches and runs whether the program itself is running or not. Timbuktu Pro. MalwareBytes. Things that load a networking protocol for later use. Applications that have special drivers. Applications that actually do background tasks (and hence are actually always running in some sense, even if the user interface only runs when you “launch” the app). But those are generally exceptions. And for most of the applications that do, the piddly little stuff they install that loads at startup (like Adobe and MIcrosoft with their “check for updates” engines) isn’t much overhead to add to startup and RAM use.
The last time I looked at his computer - and it was only for a moment - I saw lots of things giving constant live updates. Weather, email, desktop notifications for various websites, probably a few chitntzy games.
On a brand new Windows computer, there’s a trick to getting rid of a lot of this stuff.
Go to “Reset This PC” and follow the steps, but when it asks you if you want to “Restore Preinstalled Apps” select no. I can’t recall what, if anything, gets left behind, but I remember that cleaning up the vast majority of bloatware and gets you close to where you’d be if you bought Windows off the shelf and installed it.
Microsoft’s fresh start tool is worth a look, but read the caveats on the page first.
If you haven’t yet bought the new PC, Microsoft’s Surface devices ship with a completely clean install of Windows. They’re pricy, though.
As an aside…I can’t find any mention of it online, but the British magazine PC Pro ran an article a few years ago calculating how many CPU cycles and how much storage was consumed on new PCs by preinstalled “free” software, and what the cost of those resources was. In other words, if 1% of your £1000 PC’s resources are used up running bloatware, then they’ve cost you £10. They called this the “crapware tax”.
You can easily create a bootable thumb drive with a clean Windows installation with the Microsoft Creation Tool. Do a fresh install with it on the new computer, and all crapware is gone.
If you don’t want to do that, open task manager, go to the autostart-tab and disable all the programs you don’t want to open on start.
I believe so since that’s an actual MS product. This is more aimed at removing all the 3rd party garbage (think Candy Crush or Netflix) that people pay the PC makers to preinstall, they don’t come with a clean install of Windows.
Also, TwoCarrotSnowman linked to MS’ Fresh Start Tool. IIRC that’s what you actually want to use. It’s been a while but I think the Fresh Start Tool does what I mentioned earlier and the Reset Your PC tool brings it back to how it was when you got it, bloatware and all.
But I could be wrong, it’s been a while and they’re always changing these things.
Don’t rule out making a recovery disk, then you can experiment all you want and still get back to it’s out of the box state.
Also, that reminds me, OP should probably make sure System Restore is turned on and creating restore points every few days/weeks.
I seem to remember a program called pcdecrapify that undertook the task of removing the bloatware that is often installed on new computers running Windows/
It seems to be no longer supported but there are alternatives.
I found this on reddit. No idea how well it works. I try to stay away from Windows if I can.
Conversely, if you want to install a lot of open source software, I have used a program called ninite, which does the job.
A clean install of Windows from a flash drive seems a good idea. But you need to be careful you have all your license numbers AND any drivers specific to your computer. Especially if it has a touchscreen, tablet type display. It can be troublesome tracking down drivers and getting them installed. Once you have everything installed they way you want it, look for an app that takes a complete disk image and stores it on a usb drive. After a year or so Windows computers get slower and slower as the accumulate crud. It is nice to be able to over write them completely if you have a backup disk image.
I don’t trust any software to just blindly remove things from my computer, one person’s spam is another person’s ham.
What I do when cleaning up computers is go to Add or Remove programs, wait for the list to load, then sort it by date. That will let you see the recently installed programs and how big they are. Then you just have to decide whether they should stay or not.
You can also run Task Manager and click on the Startup tab, that will show you what programs are staring with Windows and you can take action based on that.
It is Tron stage_2_de-bloat.bat, mentioned above. I am not going to paste the list of the hundreds of programs on its naughty list, but you can browse the original files here: