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Do you know where your RAM is right now? You might think it's just working late

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at the office, but the truth is it's cheating on you with bloatware you

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didn't even install. And in a world where RAM is so precious, I and Threat

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Locker, who sponsored this video, think you deserve to know how much your

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systems pre-installed craps, excuse me,

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apps are impacting your performance. To

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find out, we bought a brand new Dell Tower Plus desktop and tested it three

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different ways. Once with the outofthe-box bloat, once with a cleaned

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up install, and to make things interesting, we said yes to every single

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offer for value added software that we could find in an [music] hour. McAfee,

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don't mind if I do. Razer Synapse sounds smart to me. Well, maybe not that smart

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with just 16 gigs of system memory, but we'll get to that later. First, let's

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establish a baseline by comparing our factory bloated Dell against itself

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after cleaning up our unwanted apps. Note that neither of these is completely

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clean since Adobe Creative Cloud and Steam are part of our benchmark suite.

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Also, it's important to note that this is more of an ad hoc test and if you

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want us to dive deeper, let us know and maybe Labs will do a write up in the

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future. Diving into our results, employees of Dell, you can breathe a

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sigh of relief. We do see a slight

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consistent drop in performance across most of our synthetic and productivity

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benchmarks, but it's nothing that I would worry about. And as for gaming, in

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Cyberpunk, we saw no measurable difference in performance in any of our

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test conditions. But that doesn't mean that there was no impact. For power

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consumption, we saw a 7% jump at idle, meaning the system is drawing an extra 2

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1/2 watts all the time that it's on. And

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there are aspects of the experience that aren't captured by our benchmarks that

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are a little worse. For example, our bloat configuration takes about an

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additional 30 seconds to fully boot. And then there's just the little nuisances

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like moving past an extra icon in the system tray and waiting for McAfee to

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approve everything that I do. Which raises a really big question for me. Why

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would anyone go out of their way to create a worse customer experience for

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their product, even if it is just two and a half watts? and a bit of extra

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mouse movement. It's like if I personally went into the package of

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every super soft hoodie and made it just a little less soft, which I would never

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do. So, get yours at ltctore.com. As always, the answer is money, but it's

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also a bit more nuanced than that. See, bloatware didn't start as a bad thing. I

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know, right? Back in the early 90s, when internet speeds were measured in

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megabits per hour, having software that was preloaded on a new PC was actually

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kind of convenient. OEMs even used included software as a way of

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differentiating themselves from their competition. But, as tends to happen

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over time, fully functional programs were replaced by trial wear that was

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begging you to buy it. And then by the 2000s, you weren't so much buying a

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computer as you were buying an ad delivery system. But why though? It's

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the classic race to zero mentality that keeps PC margins slim for any computer

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company that isn't named Apple. So, in order to boost their margins, PC makers

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took what used to provide extra value for their customers and weaponized it to

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shore up their profits. By how much? It's hard for us to say exactly, but we

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do have one data point. Back in 2008, InfoWorld reported that Sony had

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introduced a fresh start option that would ditch any of the pre-installed

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junk. The cost of the consumer, 50 bucks, and that was on top of a

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mandatory $100 upgrade to Windows Vista Business. Now, I don't know if they

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would get the same rates today, but what's clear is that these bloatware

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add-ons clearly pay more than just pocket change. And that kind of makes

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sense when you consider how much bloatware is designed to sell you

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additional bloat or even sell you a recurring subscription. Now, let's move

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on from our factory bloat and prepare our system for use by installing some

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common useful apps, but not the savvy way with Windet, the bloy. Now, to be

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clear, not every installer is packed with crap. Firefox went pretty well. But

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then almost immediately, Dell's one sin.

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McAfee did the thing, practically begging me to protect my digital life

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with web advisor. Sounds horrible. And

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Threat Locker agrees. Thanks, Threat Locker. Blocking that would be nice. But

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unfortunately, I have to say yes today. Um, uh, okay. I don't really see

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anything happening, but I guess McAfee has my digital back now. All right, I'm

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not going to bore you guys with the details of 24 more app installs. So,

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with the magic of editing, we're just going to speed [music] through them here, but I'll stop along the way if

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anything interesting happens.

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[music]

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[music]

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[music]

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>> [music]

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>> Heat. Heat. [music]

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Oh, here's one. Fan control requires Microsoft's.net framework to be

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installed or updated, but it's not really bloatware in the traditional

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sense.

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Oh yikes. While installing CC Cleaner, I got my first popup asking me to install

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what I would consider to be true bloware. To be clear, a vast antivirus

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isn't known to be the worst option. But on top of Windows Defender, I already

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have McAfee from Dell. And you might have heard this lines tech tip before,

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but it is not considered best practice to have multiple real-time malware

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monitoring suites running at the same time. What do I do with the prompt then?

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Well, the rules are clear.

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>> Oh my god. Hell. [music]

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[music]

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Now, at this point, I was thinking I could keep going with more software, but

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we got to draw the line somewhere. And these 25 apps took about an hour to

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install, turning our downloads and programs folders into haunted mazes of

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despair. As for our system tray, we're going to need a second monitor just to

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see all the icons. Now, let's see how much this all impacts our system

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performance. Ha, nice. We finally see

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our first noticeable drop. We're looking at anywhere from two to eight% worse

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than our clean system, which still might not sound like that much, but these

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minor slowdowns can add up over the course of a project. And if you like to

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turn your computer off at the end of the day to avoid idle power draw, you just

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added over half a minute to your boot time again. Oh, and on the subject of

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idle power draw, we crept up by another one watt on average. Still not that much

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over base, but again, this stuff can add

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up. Fortunately for the gamers out there, we still don't see any impact on

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our gaming performance. Unfortunately for the gamers though, we've yet to even

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touch the worst category of system bloatware. The applications that come

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with RGB lighting and with gaming peripherals. This is where our say yes

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to anything test is going to get kind of nasty. Immediately after plugging in

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their keyboard, MSI prompts us for their driver utility installer. Okay, we say

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yes. Then we get installers for Dropbox

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Redeem Launcher, MSI Center, Voice Mod, and Norton 360. Well, I guess I'll

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install them all except Norton because I actually see an icon on my desktop for

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that already. I don't know when that sneaked in, but that's a perfect example

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of the kind of thing that Threat Locker would have prevented. More on them

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later. For now, it's time to deck out my system with a mishmash of peripherally

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transmitted infections. The included software for many of these products are

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notorious for being resource hogs, and

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that completely ignores any extras that might come along for the ride. Looking

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at you, Norton. [music]

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>> [music]

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>> Oh, good lordy. A popup for Norton 360

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for gamers just showed up in my notifications while I was installing

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Aura Creator. I have to say yes. So now

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I have McAfee, Avast, Malware Bytes, Norton 360, and Norton 360 for gamers,

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which all sit on top of Microsoft's own defender. I can't imagine anything going

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wrong with that holy sex tet. Then at virtually the same time, Armory Crate

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popped up offering me some additional features like playground assistant and

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[music] content service. Well, who could resist playground and those other

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things? Man, this was bound to happen sooner or later. And I'm totally not

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surprised it was Armory Crate, but this is the first time that we got prompted

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for a system restart. And then almost immediately, Corsair's IQ also required

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a reboot. After another hour, we managed to get

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eight peripherals, not to mention their parasites, finally installed. And this

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is where things start to get a little sluggish. Let's have a look at the lab's

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test report. And oh lordy, it's proper boys. Adding all this extra

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bloat has caused our performance to drop by nearly 16% in some of our benchmarks.

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That's like equivalent to a CPU downgrade. At best, we see a 6 and 12%

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decrease in performance in some of our productivity and synthetic workloads.

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This is gnarly. And the performance hit

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is finally rearing its ugly head in gaming. Even again, very ironic. Okay,

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it's not nearly as much as in the more CPU dependent workloads, but at 1440p,

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we're losing nearly 10% in our 1% lows.

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As for Cyberpunk with ray tracing, the bloatware caused horrific frame pacing

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issues that cut our 1% lows in half. So,

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if you install every utility that comes with your gaming hardware and you don't

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happen to buy them all within the same ecosystem, you could be paying a serious

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price. Literally at this point, we found

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that our system had gone from idling at 38 watts to 61 watts. That is a 60%

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increase in idle power consumption. All for your computer to do nothing. And if

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you want to save power by turning your computer off, lucky you. You just get to

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wait nearly 4 minutes to turn your PC on. Just imagine how much worse this

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would have been with a laptop. Those have even more factory bloat than

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desktops from our experience. Now, for our last test, we uninstalled all the

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bloatware and fired up Threat Locker, who sponsored this video. I mean, this

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was pretty important because if the cure is worse than the disease, we wouldn't

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really want to promote it, right? So, it's kind of a risky play, but Threat

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Locker was confident that not only would their software prevent unwanted

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installs, but it would have a minimal impact on system performance. And

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looking at these bootup times, we've got good news for Threat Locker. There is no

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appreciable difference when it's added to a system. Okay. Hey, hi. It's me,

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Adam. Idle power draw. Threat Locker does have an appreciable increase over

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the non-bloated condition, but it's still much less than if you had a bunch

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of gaming blowware on there. So, as for

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our productivity tests, [music] Threat Locker has negligible effects while

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providing all of its benefits. And if any apps did try to do something that

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they weren't supposed to, Threat Locker's ring fencing would spring into

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action and put a quick halt to it. Meanwhile, for gaming, there's no big

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performance hits running Threat Locker, but it is worth noting they are there.

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Now, while CIS admins would normally block game installations, hey, one man's

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bloat could be another man's most important piece of software. That's

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where Threat Locker's learning mode comes in. [music] It scans your computer to find the software that your

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organization uses and automatically allow lists those pieces of software to

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minimize the impact on your team's productivity. And if they do need to

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install something new, Threat Locker's elevation control allows a user

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temporary time-based elevation privileges without just giving the user

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the keys to the kingdom. Anyway, this whole exercise goes to show that you've

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got to pay attention before mindlessly installing software and keep an eye on

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your system tray for programs that just plain don't need to be running in

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[music] the background. Also, if you like RGB stuff, maybe consider a

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unifying control program like OpenRGB so you can at least minimize the overhead.

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Finally, another thing to consider would be threat locker for your organization's

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needs. Most of the users watching this channel are going to know how to

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unselect bloatware. But if you're an administrator, you know that you have

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people who behave exactly like we did today and just say yes to everything.

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And threat locker is a great way to keep their systems clean, performant, and

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secure. If you guys enjoyed this video, check out the one we did on how to set

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up Windows properly. will help you avoid a lot of the bloatware [music] prompts

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in the first