Funny laptop bloatware reviews
Welcome to my collection of reviews of some of the bloatware that shipped with the funny laptop in its factory configuration, which I had originally posted to the fediverse. It's worth mentioning that some parts of my experience may have been affected by the fact that these were conducted on an in-place upgraded copy of Windows 10, rather than Windows 8.1.
1. Packard Bell and WildTangent Games
The first review I posted on wetdry.world.
Packard Bell Games is a selection of what appear to be ports of mobile games. Meanwhile, WildTangent Games App is a legit gaming client focused on
games published by the company of the same name. In the early 2010s, it was seemingly typical of Acer (Packard Bell's parent company) to preinstall
a means to play casual games instantly, but for some reason, Packard Bell also got its own client as mentioned.
I had neglected to try the Packard Bell game selection. Meanwhile, I attempted to open the "- Games -" entry at the top of the Start menu, which
turned out to be the WildTangent Games Metro-style app, which would no longer launch in Windows 10. The Win32 client, however, did launch,
but I also did nothing with it at that time.
Five days later, I noticed the WildTangent Games free trials while checking out Games Explorer in Windows 8.1; among them was the iconic Peggle Nights, which turned into bloatware review number five.
The honourable mentions
A few more notable apps were also preinstalled, including Netflix, Booking.com, Kindle and AccuWeather as Metro-style apps, as well as the Spotify desktop app. There was also an affiliate link to eBay on the desktop, as well as one to LoveFilm on the taskbar. As expected, the latter link led nowhere in 2024.
The next four reviews together landed in a single thread, starting with...!
2. ChaCha
ChaCha was advertised as a "human search engine", using assistance by humans to filter search results with greater relevance than equivalent software could provide at the time... so I've heard, because ChaCha is long gone, therefore the app couldn't do anything. In simple terms, it was broken. There wasn't much for me to work with here.
3. PC App Store & Pokki Start Menu
Initially a review of PC App Store on its own, which was offering quick downloads of popular desktop software, such as VLC and Skype in one place. It was also offering web apps such as Netflix (already made redundant by the Metro-style app), Yahoo Mail and Amazon. Many of these apps appeared to be outdated - for example, the VLC item in this store was last updated in 2022, while the app itself continues to receive updates to this day.
Upon further investigation, however, I discovered that PC App Store was associated with Pokki Start Menu, an attempt to bring back the Start menu experience from before Windows 8, which didn't render a Start button but rather was to be pinned to the taskbar. I never wrote about this program on the fedi, but that's mostly because there ain't much to write home about there.
4. newsXpresso
The RSS logo was used to represent every news source available in this app, which was why upon launching it for the first time I assumed that it was an RSS reader, but I found no way to add feeds using their URLs. This was supposed to be a means to read news from multiple sources in one place, of course. However, you could add only those sources the app itself made available to you, but none of those sources would update, including currently active news websites, which got me confused.
That's all the bloatware I could bring myself to review. There was so much of it on the factory installation that it actually hurt just to look at it! Thankfully, it's all over now and I can enjoy using the laptop without it!