My first computer of note was an NEC computer that I got for college in 1996, it ran Windows 95 and came with all sorts of great programs that seemed like they could change my life for the better. If I wasn’t sure how to do something on my computer I could call up the built in help wizard, his name was “Merlin” and he was a recorded actor that would walk you through such things as changing the wallpaper and double clicking on Internet Explorer. There was another great program to answer my telephone and take messages, no need for a answering machine in my dorm anymore, as it turned out that program had a tendency to stop working after about thirty minutes so I missed a lot of calls. It had the usual fluff programs as well that I never really needed such as the AOL trial and a few shareware games and such, but I got rid of those easily enough and life was good. I kept that NEC with the 133MHz processor for a long time, by the time I got around to getting a new computer things had changed in the PC world, Windows ME was out and there were a lot more bundled programs on the newer computers, of course, those bundled programs seemed okay from time to time. My HP Pavilion came with a media player that was absolute garbage but I bypassed that by installing Winamp and downloading a start up filter called “Start Up Cop” from some PC website that blocked programs such as Real Player and Music Match from starting up automatically and asking me if I wanted to upgrade to the paid version every time I clicked on a media file. I could easily trash the trial software and shareware games when I first started using the computer so the intrusion level was not that great, but things seemed to be getting worse. Enter Windows XP on my next computer and the rise of the trial versions – I had to remove the trial version of Norton, the trial versions of Real Player and Music Match, the shareware games and the links to online services that I did not want. It took a few hours to clean the system up and get it running the way I wanted it too, but the problems keeping the system clean kept getting harder and harder, the system tray on my new XP system seemed to be overflowing with icons in the system tray that would start without my permission and would fight like mad to stay on and to keep contacting their home servers. XP was the beginning of my search for a better way of computing. I dabbled with Linux, which came only with programs that were full featured and free from annoying pop ups begging me to buy a better version and taking up my processor cycles by always running in the background looking for any excuse to pop open and start taking over my files. In 2004 I broke free of the world of the PC makers and bought my first Macintosh, running OS X 10.3 Panther. To my surprise, there were only a few pre-installed programs that I needed to get rid of, mainly Tony Hawk and a small package of shareware games that I could easily drag to the trash and delete. None of those programs were intrusive and they never did anything unless I manually opened them. It was a different world, a world free from pop up windows asking me to upgrade to the latest version of some shareware program that I never used, a world free of resource hogging applications that would arbitrarily decide to load at start up and a world free of bloatware that required third party programs such as firewalls just to keep them from communicating with the outside world without my permission. Life was good and I forgot all about the world of the PC, until I started working at a computer store. Windows Vista had just come out and the new models from major manufacturers seemed to be teeming with third party programs that did nothing aside from asking for your money. There were Netflix trial accounts, Vongo trials, AOL broadband trials, Norton trials, Microsoft Office trials, strange start up programs that manifested themselves on the desktop and tried to control every aspect of your life from your favorite TV shows to what kind of desktop wallpaper you would like to have, in short, the computers were loaded down with so much junk that they took over 5 minutes to boot up and the system trays would have at least 8 programs running from the start. The store I worked at used to charge 50 dollars to get rid of the trial and bloatware, and they got a large number of takers. My newest computer, a MacBook running OS X Tiger, came with no such programs and would start up in under 40 seconds and ran like a dream. The difference between the world of the PC and the world of the Macintosh is staggering, and I would never make the trip back to PC land after seeing how sweet life can be without all the third party clutter. Perhaps if these PC makers could tone it down a bit, offer freeware or open source programs in stead of money grabbing commercial junk that could only exist as a pre-installed application since no one would ever buy it in a box. There are plenty of great programs out there that could handle media files, manage a firewall, and even work with word processing documents that there is little to no need to burden consumers with crapware out of the box. Until they decide to do that, I won’t even consider visiting the world of the PC.