Bloatware is becoming more and more of a problem for Windows users. Some, often very useful, software will install so much rubbish on your PC that it becomes harder to use, or even downright slow. Inexperienced users will often find their computers unusable because companies bundle too much addition software, or add too many features into their product. I’ll count down some of the worst examples, starting with the absolute king of the hill…
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One of the minor gripes I have about my digital camera is that it stores the MPEG4 videos I records in Apple’s Quicktime format. Not only does this format not speed up time in any way, it’s also hard to process or convert to other file formats. I would have preferred AVI, simply because its far more common on Windows PCs and pretty much any software can load and save AVI files.

While googling for a good converter I came across MP4Cam2AVI. If you can decipher it, the name pretty much says it all. It converts typical digicam MOVs to AVI. And most importantly, it does so without decoding and re-encoding the actual image data stream. Unlike with other solutions the image quality is not affected, it simply changes the video’s file container to AVI. That takes less than a second on my PC, and if you like, MP4Cam2AVI can batch process multiple files for you.

Even though I’m pretty much stuck using Windows for work, I’ve always been fascinated by alternative operating systems. Years ago I had a dual boot system with Windows 2000 and BeOS 4.5, and a couple of years ago I played around with Linux on older machines. None of these solutions were very useful though. Having to switch back to windows to use Photoshop or having an old PC take up desk space isn’t very convenient. This is where virtualization software like VirtualBox comes in.
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One of the few problems wth free software is the fact that the authors usually do not have huge marketing budgets to promote their work. This is why I didn’t know about Synergy until Matt Cutts blogged about it. It’s also why it took me ages to find a decent backup tool. I was just about to pay for a mediocre shareware solution when I came across Cobian Backup.
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