How pre-installed software is wrecking your laptop’s gaming performance

If you have ever bought a gaming laptop or a pre-built PC, you’ll know the pain of booting up your brand-new system only to greeted by the daunting sight of pre-installed bloatware such as McAffee and warranty registration pop-ups.

While more tech-savvy gamers will at least attempt to navigate the wide array of pre-installed software and uninstall everything unnecessary, some gamers will not remove the software, thinking that a brand-new gaming laptop will perform as well as it can.

They would be mistaken, as laptop bloatware has been known to consistently lower gaming performance, a fact recently illustrated by GamersNexus in a side-by-side performance comparison.

Comparing the performance of MSI gaming laptops with and without bloatware installed, it is easy to see the performance difference caused by the pre-installed software.

Below was some of the bloatware installed on the two machines:

Norton Anti-Virus
Killer Networking
SteelSeries keyboard management
Touchpad management
Warranty registration pop-ups
MSI control panel
Intel software
Microsoft OneDrive
Nahimic Audio Enhancer

Check out the results below, courtesy of GamersNexus (click on images to enlarge):

MSI GE62VR

Processor: Intel Core i7-6700HQ

Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 1060

Memory: 16GB DDR4

MSI GE62

Processor: Intel Core i7-5700HQ

Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 970M

Memory: 16GB DDR3L

Results

It is plainly obvious that pre-installed bloatware on gaming laptops can cause massive performance issues.

Performance was decreased by almost 50% in some cases, with a marked increase in frame drops and stuttering.

Ironically, the bloatware installed on the factory default MSI GE62VR makes the laptop unsuitable for VR play, as the performance results indicate a high amount of stuttering and an overall worse experience than a clean install without bloatware.

MSI is not the only manufacturer who ships its gaming laptops with bloatware, this data simply reflects the most recent comprehensive test available.

Most, if not all laptop manufacturers are guilty of shipping devices with pre-installed software, although it is particularly prevalent amongst gaming notebooks.

The hardware inside the latest gaming laptops is undoubtedly top-notch, it is just a shame that companies insist on impeding gaming performance by loading up their devices with pre-installed bloatware.