We posted a content piece pertaining to MSI’s pre-installed software – which we called “bloatware” – prior to the start of Computex. The company had responded at first with silence to emails, but then responded mid-week (in emails) with an overall neutral tone that suggested a wish to improve. There wasn’t much said in the emails, though, and certainly nothing official – so we sought out MSI’s US laptop representative at Computex, then asked for comment.

MSI’s Clifford Chun joined us, Product Manager of Laptops at MSI (US HQ), and discussed the company’s intermediary solution to the excessive pre-installed software. As Chun states in the video below, MSI will begin including an uninstaller package with their new laptops in 2H17. This utility will provide check boxes to each of the pre-installed applications and, upon launching it, will allow users to check and delete software. There is some irony to the idea of including more software to remove software, of course, but it’s a first step. It’d also be ideal to opt-in, not out, but marketing agreements do not generally permit this (as we said in the first video).

We’ll talk more below about why MSI is stuck in a difficult position, but first, the interview:

One of the most frustrating aspects of the hardware industry is when a company made a perfectly viable product, but somehow flummoxed execution. The consumer doesn’t see the architecture or the engineering – at least, not outside of reviews – they see the full picture. In this capacity, consumers get a view of a product that is similar to a product manager’s: The big picture as it comes together, seeing past all the smaller details along the way.

A GPU might, for instance, be a powerhouse when analyzed under an SEM or in a vacuum, but could prove hamstrung in adverse thermal conditions resultant of an inadequate cooler. More appropriately, a laptop could host the best mobile hardware available, but prove devalued when flooded with unneeded software. The fastest SSD in the business, as bogged down with bloatware, will still be slower than a clean Windows install on a fresh HDD.

This big picture is sometimes lost to the chaos of marketing development efforts, particularly when MDF starts exchanging hands, and lost in the need to turn a profit in an industry with small margins. That’s what happened with MSI’s laptops: These are completely capable, highly competitive laptops that demand attention – but they’re plagued with an ineffable concoction of applications, responsible for doubling time required to boot. That’s not all, either – we have measured an impact to noise output as the CPU boosts sporadically, an unpredictable and spurious impact to frametimes, an impact to battery life, and an overall reduction in product quality.

All because of bloatware.

When we received the new 10-series laptops for review, we immediately noticed sluggishness in the OS just preparing the environment for testing. Even with an SSD, opening Windows Explorer took at least one full second – eternity, by today's standards. It was anything but instant, as a new computer should be, and would prompt outrage from any real-world consumer.

Looking further into the issue, we realized that the system tray accommodated 13 icons of pre-installed software that opened on launch. This included an incessant warranty registration pop-up/reminder, Norton Anti-Virus (the biggest offender on spurious CPU utilization), about three different control panels – because we need multiple paths to one location – and a few other programs.

This, traditionally, is what's known as “bloatware;” it's software pre-installed by the manufacturer that the user didn't necessarily request, and bloats the system's processes to a crawl. Today, we're showing just how profoundly a new system's framerate is dragged down by bloat. Using an MSI GE62VR Apache Pro laptop (~$1600) with a GTX 1060 and an i7-6700HQ CPU (boosts to 3.5GHz), 16GB DDR4, and an M.2 SSD, we're clearly not running Windows on slow hardware. And that's the thing, too – even Windows is slow at the desktop level. Just using the desktop, we'd occasionally spike to ~30% load for no good reason, and frequently hit 100% load during file transfers (thanks, Norton).

For validation purposes, we also ran the same tests on an MSI GE62 Apache Pro with a GTX 970M and i7 CPU. That's one last-gen model and one current model, both clean Windows installs with all the factory-preset software included.