crapware

We suspect that its extra pound of heft is made up entirely of crapware—the Vaio ships with a ludicrous number of useless preinstalled applications. We understand the economic necessities of subsidizing inexpensive PCs with third-party crapware, but there's no excuse for whoring out a notebook of this price.

Big-name system vendors typically install software on their consumer PCs at the factory. These "extras" go by many names: bundleware, begware, bloatware, and my favorite, crapware. That's because a lot of it is just that: useless crap. […] A few vendors, like Sony and Dell, offer some options to avoid crapware, but usually just for small businesses. Boutique manufacturers, like Velocity Micro, do a better job of providing a clean system.