Bring your Windows 7-based PC into a Microsoft Store and one of their techs will remove any unwanted bloatware and optimize the system, for a fee of course.
For over a year, Microsoft has been offering “Signature” systems from a handful of its hardware partners, which feature minimal, if any, pre-installed bloatware. The vast majority of companies selling Windows machines tend to load-up their systems with annoying trialware and advertisements to help mitigate costs, usually to the detriment of end users. If you’ve ever bought a brand new PC and powered it up for the first time, only to be bombarded with pop-ups and offers for various applications, you’ll understand how annoying some pre-installed bloatware can be. As Microsoft puts it, “Many new PCs come filled with lots of trialware and sample software that slows your computer down—removing all that is a pain, so we do it for you! Every PC the Microsoft Store sells is put on a software diet and performance is tuned to run the best it can. We call this process Microsoft Signature.”Microsoft felt the pre-installed bloatware included with new systems often degraded the user experience, and as such, started selling Signature systems through the microsoftstore.com website and Microsoft Store locations with much of the bloatware removed, in favor of a few Microsoft-built alternatives. Walt Mossberg is reporting, however, that Microsoft is now also offering consumers Signature services for any system running Windows 7. Users can now bring their machines to a Microsoft Store and for $99, a technician will remove any bloatware and optimize the system’s performance. In addition to cleaning the system and tuning Windows, that $99 also includes the installation of Windows Live Essentials, ad-supported Office Started Edition, Zune software, Internet Explorer with Bing optimization, and Microsoft Security Essentials. 90 days of phone support is thrown in as well.
I like the idea of Microsoft offering an easy way for users to experience Windows as the company intended. In fact, one of the first things I do when I get a new, pre-configured machine (usually a laptop—I build my own desktops), is power it up, make sure everything is working properly, and then I format the drive and install a clean copy of Windows. I despise bloatware and think offering removal services is a good idea. Running benchmarks on a clean system may or may not show performance differences depending on the type of tests being run, but startup, shutdown, and resume-from-standby times are almost always improved, and more free memory and drive space will be available. $99 seems a bit steep though. There are free tools available for download that will quickly and easily remove many common pieces of bloatware and the applications that MS does install are free download as well. Sure, the company is out to make a profit, and the 90 days of support ads value, but a hundred bucks to clean a PC seems a bit pricey, especially in this day and age of cheap PCs.How do you all feel about Microsoft’s Signature service? Would you take advantage of the service if you lived near a Microsoft Store? We’d love some feedback.
