It has probably happened to you. You get your new desktop or laptop in the mail or bring it home from a store, fire it up (after staring at the icon-happy quick set-up poster), and find yourself confronted with a screen full of programs that you didn't install. Welcome to the phenomenon known as bloatware. Here at PCMag, we define bloatware as programs preinstalled on your system above and beyond the OS that "bulk up" and occupy space on the system's hard drive. It's also known as trialware, crapware, shovelware, and adware. This is the stuff that PC makers preinstall, ostensibly for your convenience.

Why Art Thou, Bloatware?
So, why is there bloatware at all? For the same reason that stickers from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia get prominent placement on your PC's case: brand awareness and money. Companies like Symantec and Rhapsody offer their products so that people get to try them and hopefully decide to continue using them. For companies like Symantec, the money is in antivirus app subscriptions that have to be updated often. Companies like Rhapsody will hope you like the music so much that you'll want to pay for access to it. The PC manufacturers like them because these companies pay for occupying the space on your drive, just like when a cosmetics giant rents space in a major department store.

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Preinstalled programs may also cause problems with programs you actually want to install in the future. This is why enterprise-class business systems and high-end gaming systems come with very little bloatware. Let's say your PC comes with Brand N Anti-Virus, but you like how Brand M works better. Even if you remove Brand N, there may be bits of the program left over that might interfere with and crash Brand M. This is rare, but still can happen, since programs tend to leave bits of themselves (script files, shared files) even after uninstalling the program.—Next: Recognizing Bloatware >