Lyle

PC Bloatware Trends

Lyle / June 11, 2007

PC manufacturers have been loading “trial application” on the PCs they sell for years. We took a look at three of the more common bloatware titles to get a view of the historical trends. The titles identified for our analysis included the WildTangent Game Console, URL Assistant by Google (aka Browser Address Error Redirector) and Microsoft’s own Activation Assistant for the 2007 Office Suites. Our research shows that the prevalence of these applications have more than doubled in the past year. Vista systems especially seem to a target for this software. Over 35% of Vista systems running PC Pitstop’s on-line tests in May 2007 had a least one of these bloatware application installed.

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Unutilized D Drive Partitions

Lyle / May 14, 2007

Our research shows that, overall, approximately 3.1% of PCs that have one physical hard drive also have an unutilized partition with drive letter D:. Our research indicates that 4.8% of portables and 2.4% of desktops have a D: drive partition that has 99% or more free space. It appears that it is common for some vendors to split the primary hard drive into two partitions. Often a drive is split into two equal partitions. If you think your hard drive capacity isn’t what you paid for, you might want to check to see if you have an unutilized drive partition.

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PC Pitstop PC Gaming Survey Results

Lyle / May 10, 2007

The results of our April 2007 PC Gaming Survey have been analyzed. Below are some of our findings.

Almost everyone has a favorite PC game. Almost 96% of the responders to our survey indicate that they play one or more PC games on a regular basis. While the games that are loaded with the Windows operating systems are not as addictive as other types, almost 70% indicated that they occasionally or regularly play these free games.

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PC Pitstop Vista Survey Results

Lyle / April 13, 2007

The results of our February and March 2007 Vista Survey are in. Our initial analysis of the survey data is found below.

In summary, the results of our survey are generally not good news for Microsoft. While Microsoft’s ‘The “Wow” starts now’ tag line for Vista marketing focuses attention to its visual and graphic capabilities, the software giant appears to have under-estimated the importance of marketing the more tangible benefits that PC users want or expect. Our survey results indicate a significant amount of uncertainty or confusion by PC users as to the benefits of upgrading to Vista.

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PC Pitstop Storage and Backup Survey Results

Lyle / April 13, 2007

The results of our December 2006 Storage and Backup Survey are in. Our initial analysis of the survey data is found below.

An astounding 27.5% of people never backup their hard drive, and 13% do it once a year. Personally, I backup once a month, and I really should do it more often. I am the owner of about 5 PC’s, and due to the law of averages, I experience about 1 hard drive crash a year. If you think of all the important information one stores on their PC’s, pictures, emails, work, videos, it would be a crime to lose all of this due to procrastinating a backup.

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PC Pitstop Printer Survey Results

Lyle / April 13, 2007

The results of our January 2007 Printer Survey are in. Our initial analysis of the survey data is found below.

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Small Hard Drive Partitions

Lyle / April 13, 2007

Some PC vendors are making a practice of creating a small partition on a system’s primary hard drive in which to store the systems’ original restoration information. Generally these partitions are 5 – 12 Gigabytes in size and are preformatted during the manufacturing process. The practice appears to have replaced the inclusion of a restoration CD for some PC vendors. While it may be considered a convenience by some to have the operating system and driver backups loaded on the local hard drive, the practice should not be considered a safe backup practice for these system files.

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US Income Tax Preparation Software Prevalence

Lyle / March 6, 2007

Each year, the publishers of US tax preparation software bombard the ad space with their promotions for US tax preparation software. PC Pitstop took a look at just how prevalent this type of software is on US PCs. We also took a look at the most popular titles to see how they compare.

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Prevalence of Canadian Digital Media Sharing & Copying Sftwr

Lyle / February 15, 2007

A January 2007 Canada.com news story reported that according to a Twentieth Century Fox investigation, as much as fifty percent of the world’s pirated movies come from Canada. The article cites that the Canadian Copyright Act, as well as the internal policies of police forces, make it extremely difficult for them to crack down on movie piracy. The focus of the article was on the practice of “camcording” of movies in Montreal movie houses.

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Microsoft Zune

Lyle / January 15, 2007

In mid November 2006, Microsoft released Zune, their brand of portable media player in the US markets. The product was targeted to compete with the popular Apple iPod. The launch model of Zune, included a 30 GB hard drive, built in FM tuner and a 3 inch screen. Microsoft attempted to differentiate their product from the competition by adding a built in Wi-Fi that allows Zune users to wirelessly share songs, playlists and pictures with other Zunes.

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