I said YES to every Bloatware Pop-up

TL;DR

Accepting every bloatware prompt during software installation degraded PC performance by up to 16% and increased idle power draw by 60%.

Key Points

• 1.Three test conditions were compared on a new Dell Tower Plus: factory bloat, clean install, and a "yes to everything" bloatware build assembled over two hours
• 2.Factory bloat alone added 30 seconds to boot time and increased idle power draw by 7% (~2.5 extra watts) with minimal benchmark impact
• 3.Saying yes to every installer pop-up (25 apps in ~1 hour) caused 2–8% performance drops and added another 30+ seconds to boot time
• 4.RGB/peripheral software (Armory Crate, Corsair iCUE, ASUS Aura, etc.) was the worst offender, dropping benchmarks by up to 16% and cutting Cyberpunk 1% lows in half with severe frame pacing issues
• 5.Idle power consumption jumped from 38W to 61W — a 60% increase — just from background bloatware processes, and boot time stretched to nearly 4 minutes
• 6.Bloatware exists because PC margins are razor-thin; OEMs earn meaningful revenue from pre-installed trials and subscriptions — Sony charged customers $50 in 2008 just to skip it