The day Tom Schavo installed the latest McAfee anti-virus software, his Pentium dual core laptop slowed down surprisingly. He noticed that the start up took a long time. Browsers took many seconds to launch, all the applications became dead slow. Rebooting,scanning the system, defragmentation, cleaning of registry and even re-installation of operating system could do nothing good to it. Nothing could improve the speed until the non essential features of the anti virus bundle were un-installed. Well, this is nothing new to PC users.

Manufactures put expensive upgrades down our throats faster than you can say George Moore. Most of the PC users use it only to browse the internet use MS office, play music and watch movies. These extra applications that come along with anti-virus software, eat up vast space of RAM and processors thus causing the computer to run like a snail. Very common softwares that are "feature- rich", bloated, RAM-hungry, processor draining like the Fatso from Windows, Adobe and Nero are a part or this program. Irritated PC users are fighting back choosing lean upstarts over fat marquee products.

The 1970'S concept of writing lean and simple code is in.Nod 32, an anti virus software written in assembly code is making McAfee run for its business. Foxit reader is smaller, faster and becoming increasingly popular than Adobe reader. Utorrent, the surprisingly little bit torrent client written in C++, barely registers on the CPU. VLC and Media player classic are smaller and compliant with more codex than Windows media player. The foobar's pluggins don't burden the CPU like Winamp.

Fortunately in the world full of careless computer designers, there are a few who come as the life savers. So the next time your PC goes slow, instead of upgrading the hardware, start removing the unnecessary softwares!