What is the best(worst) bloated software ?

Humm. We often blame different softwares being bloated and installing junk extras which lowers your system performance. Some of the popular names in the list are norton, aol and adobe in my view.

What you guys think? Which softwares you think as bloated or installs junks or affects your system performance?

Most bloated software ever? Windows Vista wins hands down.

Originally posted by operafan2006:

Some of the popular names in the list are norton, aol and adobe in my view.?

Adobe what? Some of their products are fairly slim and of excellent quality.

Originally posted by Moose:

Originally posted by operafan2006:

Some of the popular names in the list are norton, aol and adobe in my view.?

Adobe what? Some of their products are fairly slim and of excellent quality.

I might have missed their nice products. But I have seen their big name products like adobe acrobat(both reader and full acrobat), Dreamweaver(after adobe took it and released dream weaver cs3), adobe premiere cs3, adobe photoshop cs3 ... all heavily bloated. Lots of junks like adobe bridge etc are installed. A complete mess in my view.

Registry Mechanic is at the top of my list of bloatware...

I think Windows has to be the most bloated software. Take a look at this thread at PC Advisor (it is worth registering)

My Windows XP Home directory = 3.49 GB in 21,364 files. Does the OS really need all of that?

Originally posted by sgunhouse:

RealPlayer is always a "good" one.

Opinions about RealPlayer are diverging to say the least.
Personally I don't have any opinion since I never felt a need to install it.

Originally posted by sgunhouse:

RealPlayer is always a "good" one. Wants to install RealDownload, RealJukebox, etc. even if you already have products you'd rather use.

Yes, I for about it to mention upfront. it is definitely friendly to junks installation.

Next to most Firewalls it is IMHO WinOnCd starting with 6 and getting worse ever since. Then PaintShopPro since belonging to Corel.

Originally posted by Macallan:

Most bloated software ever? Windows Vista wins hands down.

When I clicked on the thread title, "Windows" instantly came to mind... you took the words right out of my mouth

Apart from that, I think I could add McAffee software, RealPlayer and some others I don't remember.

Concerning the Adobe products, I haven't tried the newer versions of their products but my father says Acrobat 8.0 is great. Older software (mainly Photoshop 7, CS, CS2 and Photoshop Elements) worked very well when i used them.

Norton Security Suite or whatever it calls itself these days

Originally posted by operafan2006:

Some of the popular names in the list are norton, aol and adobe in my view.

I haven't try neither Norton nor AOL so I can't say nothing about them, but indeed I dislike Adobe suite -although I need to use Acrobat (not Reader) until I find a (better) alternative, and Photoshop for class lessons.
Paint Shop Pro since Corel? Well, in general terms i have to say it is, but I still find it much faster and handy to use than Photoshop.

And just my adding to the list: Winamp (which is, by far, my favourite multimedia player) is getting more and more bloated since... 5 or so, I think. Just wish they'll work in adding better video and DVD support instead of adding useless features.
If they don't stop at time, I'll seriously think on downgrade it.

Originally posted by purgossu:

And just my adding to the list: Winamp (which is, by far, my favourite multimedia player) is getting more and more bloated since... 5 or so, I think. Just wish they'll work in adding better video and DVD support instead of adding useless features.
If they don't stop at time, I'll seriously think on downgrade it.

Ah yes, I remember - when 3.x was released I played with it a little bit, got too annoyed by instability, orders of magnitude higher CPU usage and general bloatiness that I went back to 2.95.

MOST bloated is Nero . then it's ADOBE.also ad aware 2007 is a lot bloated.

Originally posted by ABHINAV202020:

also ad aware 2007 is a lot bloated.

Most commercial anti-spyware tools are bloated. It's really sad when the most common tools to protect our computers slow them down as much as the malware does... Oh well, at least I know of a few that are more efficient...

forgot to meton system mechanic from iolo.com . I liked this sofware until vrsion4, 5. But from version 6 its a monster. Does pretty much same thing as ccleaner and defrag utilities does. What a waste of resources.

The most bloated has to be Nero. It's just funny at this point.

Adobe professional applications are something different than bloated in my opinion because they really are intended for professionals who use powerful PCs and don't play music on the same PC while they're using Photoshop or After Effects. You should compare other professional software. Avid Xpress and Tascam Gigastudio usually get whole super PCs all to themselves. For slower PCs, I'd recommend Photoshop 7 or Elements and consumer grade video software like Premiere Elements.

Originally posted by purgossu:

Paint Shop Pro since Corel? Well, in general terms i have to say it is, but I still find it much faster and handy to use than Photoshop.

Ok, Photoshop is even more worse... but I still curse Corel that they made another PhotoBrushUpSuite out of Paintshop, instead on focusing on its strength of Raster&Vector Support. For Vector they still suffer from lousy support of Fileformats and even their Raster Import could be much better - not that I want them to include GDAL (A Geotransformation Libraryset - & that support one could most possible integrate on her own as Photoshop supports Python for Scripting and if they would be expanding that API), but reading of Georeferenced Images (like Geotiff, MrSid, or other Formats) and supporting Shapefiles or something like OGC-conform XML files for that would be most appreciated.... At least they could keep the Header and Layer Information they don't understand and save it again with the edited picture (I hate it to re-georeference my GeoTiffs each time I cleansed them up for presentation in PP, not thinking about GTs with more then 3 spectral channels).

But hey, suppliieng just another - we don't have enough of such low-budget/OEM - suit for messing up some private Picture Galleries seem to be more money today then beeing intuitive and geting a foot into a buisseness niche where it could be worthwhile today.

Originally posted by ABHINAV202020:

also ad aware 2007 is a lot bloated

I agree with this one. My computer was incredibly slow and a look at taskmanager revealed that it was using over 100MB of memory, even though I'd closed it. Though this was possibly a bug and not just due to it being bloated.

One of the thing I have noticed that some of the softwares were not bad at all in the past. Just recently, may be one or two years(may be something to do with Win vista buzz or something), softwares started to enhance their visual look by doing flashy screens etc and tried to integrate manythings into one. therefore leading to the way of being bloated. I may be wrong but at least my experience with system emchanic is exactly this. I liked this as mentioned before. Suddenly I saw the look changed and many more extras showing up. It self started consuming memoris while it is intended to clean up system mess and make computers faster.

Originally posted by operafan2006:

softwares started to enhance their visual look by doing flashy screens etc and tried to integrate manythings into one.

That was not Vista, it started around XP Times.... Can't remember if it actually was XP that caused it, or if Apps started it somewhere in pre-times... but that is also something that come to my mind when thinking WinOnCd6 vs. 5 (or 3.7)... and wich caught me off-hand once I installed 8.... The GUI is occupying more space now for fancy, and sacrificing the display of information because the space left for that got smaller and smaller. Maybe that is the reason I am always configuring my Desktop (and as an example Operas Skin) to W2k/Classic look (and wich may be the reason I stick with MPC). Damned, I use the PC to work, not to wanker myself everytime I start an App. And using 2 or 3+ Monitors for working was ever a benefit, but what good is it if each display is just x-60% Data and 40-99% GUI? For that I could easily use just one Monitor with a GUI that uses Windows(Container) as what Windows(") are meant to be: Borders of Context. Foolish old me, but OS and Apps should be that: OS and Apps, not a Game (unless that App. is a Game), nor a PinUp-Picture or ActionMovie...

P.S.: IMHO each Terminal/CLI Window, or Emacs (As Editor, UUCP FrontEnd, etc.) as an example are more sexier than anything Vista or XP could offer with their Themes/Looks/etc. Focusing on Task is whats needed, not Focusing on distraction as also pleasing the NonRTFM-KindOfPerson is a waste of resource (even if that is the fast money)...

Least bloated software (as far as anti-virus)is NOD-32, it barely effects the running speed at all. Instead of trawling through lists of known viruses it just looks for files that behave like a virus (simple eh?)and hence no system slow down, unobtrusive updates too, and not to mention its the best antivirus money can buy.

Most bloated award has to go to Norton A.V.!! Pants Pants Pants.

Well thats antivirus covered , Maybe this blog should have been broken down into itty bitty catagories of software???

Unfortunately, the latest version of NOD32 "features" a personal firewall.

Does it? You are sure you are not refering to their Smart Security Suite? I just had tested 3 with my old licence early this year and had a few questions to customer support about some changes, and I would have opted for it with my currently fresh nlite install of X64 - but as my old free offer by german magazine licence would run out on 27Feb, I just started with the next free offered licence by the C't Magazine wich this time is limited to V2.7. So I am unaware of any recent changes. But I bet you mix it up with their Security Suite...Product Def: AV vs. Suite

ESET's NOD32 v3 does not contain a firewall. I use it as my real-time anti-virus on Vista x64. Of course the new ESET Smart Security suite does contain a firewall, but that's not NOD32 (even though it uses the same ThreatSense engine).

Nokia makes horribly bloated software.

Carbide, Nokias theme editor, is 150 MB worth of the most horribly designed software I've ever seen.

Nokia Map Loader: two dozen megabytes and it only works if you install .net framework, which adds hundreds of megabytes to your hard drive. All this junk is required for the very simple task of downloading map files and unzipping them to a memory card. Everytime you add a new map it deletes all the existing maps so you'll have to download them all over again.

Fortunately it's possible to get maps for Nokia Maps without using their maploader-from-hell: http://nokiamaps.moo.no gets the map files straight from Nokia's own servers. Works with any browser on any OS, and you don't need to install anything.

Adobe ImageReady

Originally posted by ||||||||||||:

Adobe ImageReady

ANything from adobe is getting bloated now-a-days. Specifically, their so called creative suite or cs3 items just terrible.

Originally posted by operafan2006:

Originally posted by ||||||||||||:

Adobe ImageReady

ANything from adobe is getting bloated now-a-days. Specifically, their so called creative suite or cs3 items just terrible.

Photoshop CS3 was so bloated that I actually reverted back to using Photoshop 7!!

I don't care about the new features in the CS editions, they're so bloat it makes them hard to work with.

Generally speaking I don't mind about photoshop being bloated. I mostly use it as a "central program", meaning I put most of my focus on that and have other things running in the background. In that respect I can excuse it from being bloated. It's programs like Adobe's PDF reader that cause me problems, once in school Adobe Acrobat brought my whole PC to a complete stop just because it wanted to check for updates. I hadn't had chance to save my work so I had to restart and lost a good 20 minutes' progress. Which thankfully wasn't a lot, so I did re-make it fairly quickly.

ALL the softwares and pictures on site http://www.abhinav1.cn
are bloated. i just downloaded trial of nero here and it was absolutely bloated. so my choice is nero.

Originally posted by ABHINAV202020:

i just downloaded trial of nero here and it was absolutely bloated. so my choice is nero.

Adobe Reader, 110 Odd MB for a reader, it's insane. And with all its size it still deploys asynchronous communication and hence making any browser non-responsive till it loads the document.

Firefox ? :-D

Bloatware = HD space and/or RAM/Resource hog

Most Bloated:
Windows - I've gotten used to (and actually like) XP, but I would never touch Vista
Linux - the many 'standard distros' that come packed full of stuff that people will never use
Firefox - clunky and slow - dumped it several years ago
Nero - dumped it several years ago
Anti-Virus pgrms - way too resource-hungry (I stopped wasting my time with AV - never had any virus problems)

Room for improvement?:
Opera - I would NOT ever consider Opera 'bloatware', but I think there's room to improve its RAM utilization

I've really gotten tired of Nero - all I want is Nero Burning Rom - what is the replacement everyone is using?

Edit: Exceed 200x is super bloated. All you need is an X server on Windows, and they give you this monstrosity.

Originally posted by jp10558:

I've really gotten tired of Nero - all I want is Nero Burning Rom - what is the replacement everyone is using?

I suggest you to try ImgBurn and/or take a look at this thread.

Originally posted by operafan2006:

Humm. We often blame different softwares being bloated and installing junk extras which lowers your system performance. Some of the popular names in the list are norton, aol and adobe in my view.

What you guys think? Which softwares you think as bloated or installs junks or affects your system performance?

Weell, I just uninstalled Flight Simulator because it got to 4000MB which I thought pretty big and the best was one, I wrote to find p/(q!=0) roots of a complex number with exception handling plus more math routines 0.032MB:bye:

Nero went from the best burning software (nero 5) to the worst bloated junk ever.. You try to download the cd burner and you're forced to download hundreds of MB of junk with media players, media converts, and in the middle a bloated burning program. It sucks suckiness.

Acrobat reader is the 2nd on the list. How can a lame pdf reader need 30MB installer size ?

Vista ? I don't want to get started on this, and I still haven't used it, luckily

Real player and quicktime. Good luck we have real alternative and quicktime alternative. real is adware, fills your system with junk, QT is the worst software apple produced... giant in filesize, bloated, insecure.

Originally posted by xErath:

Nero went from the best burning software (nero 5) to the worst bloated junk ever.. You try to download the cd burner and you're forced to download hundreds of MB of junk with media players, media converts, and in the middle a bloated burning program. It sucks suckiness.

That's why now they got Nero Lite

HP Printer Drivers for their consumer printers.

200MB Plus for the "basic" driver. More than twice that for the full-featured one.

And this wasn't even that sophisticated of a printer! I've since switched to Epson.

What can be the most bloated softwares except Vista, Nero 8,7 and Adobe Photoshop (and other big programs), i think creative suite... ha ha ah 8 GB program........

Although Nero 8 works much fine after installation but installation takes 3 hrs.. When I installed frst time, I thought as if better life after my PC's death..

Windows Vista, Winamp 5.5, Photoshop CS3, MS Office 2007, newest Skype versions...

Originally posted by andish182:

MS Office 2007

I experimented it with my pC and office 07 works very fast without any problem.. Similar to Nero where installation takes high time but program, after setup runs smooth..

config- Pentium III
550 Mhz
256 MB ram (I guess it will however work in 128 also)

Now dont say, you have pc older than this..!!

Originally posted by utkarsh.bisht:

Originally posted by andish182:

MS Office 2007

I experimented it with my pC and office 07 works very fast without any problem.. Similar to Nero where installation takes high time but program, after setup runs smooth..

config- Pentium III
550 Mhz
256 MB ram (I guess it will however work in 128 also)

Now dont say, you have pc older than this..!!

Just curious, how much space did office2007 take after install?

Originally posted by operafan2006:

Just curious, how much space did office2007 take after install?

I need to install Office 07 again it means becauz, im using open office and i really liked feature of creating pdf..
Also, i wanna add- it was Office 07 enterprise edition....

why not use cute pdf to make your pdf? its free.

Originally posted by Mescalitto:

Least bloated software (as far as anti-virus)is NOD-32, it barely effects the running speed at all. Instead of trawling through lists of known viruses it just looks for files that behave like a virus (simple eh?)and hence no system slow down, unobtrusive updates too, and not to mention its the best antivirus money can buy.

Most bloated award has to go to Norton A.V.!! Pants Pants Pants.

Well thats antivirus covered , Maybe this blog should have been broken down into itty bitty catagories of software???

Nice joke.. Tried latest version of eset..... It takes side by 100% Cpu memory....... well i know that nod32 takes least memory though...

Norton only takes high memory due\ring system startup, more accurately high harddisk controlling priority. It does scan at every startup and then it allows us to work.. Not side by side.... although all AV have this feature. Only difference is that, Norton takes more time..... i guess it scans more files or their scanning speed is slow or they do binary scan..

I tend avoid all .NET based applications unless there is absolutely no other alternative. I used to admire Microsoft for their highly optimized software codes. But with the birth of the .NET framework, I get really pi***d off. It's like all the future softwares will be a Java based applications, considering that it comes from the big, dominant & tech-pushy company. Trully bloated directly from the core.

Since the parts of .NET framework that take most of the storage space are libraries, .NET based application code should be much smaller. Even smaller than native, non .NET applications. A 100KB .NET program can do a complex graphical calculation & animation where non .NET program would take at least 500KB. But if a .NET application still take a lot of storage space, then we'll quickly know how bloated that software is.

The only thing I can think of the cause of the bloatness is that more and more programmers are getting lazy to optimize their code. They may think "So what? Nowadays PC are getting faster every 4 months. Memory and storage capacity is also increasing by the year. There's plenty of room for making the software looks nicer and the CPU wouldn't hurt much if we add several bonus features". Frankly, if I hear that kind of thinking, my hand would end up on someone's face.

The fact that .NET applications are increasing by the number, is because it's relatively easy to create a rich featured application in a short time and the .NET libraries are really packed with features. Even for me, as a programmer, was temped to migrate to .NET.