I said YES to every Bloatware Pop-up

Quick Overview

The Dell Tower Plus desktop, tested out-of-box and after removing bloatware (including installing ThreatLocker), showed minimal performance differences in synthetic benchmarks but experienced significant power consumption increases (up to 60% higher idle draw) and much longer boot times (up to 4 minutes slower) when gaming peripherals were connected alongside the de-bloated configuration.

Key Points: The de-bloated configuration with ThreatLocker showed negligible performance differences compared to the out-of-box configuration in PCMark 10 (2884 vs 2855) and Cinebench 2024 (1494 vs 1481). In Adobe Premiere Pro testing, the de-bloated configuration scored 123318, slightly lower than the out-of-box score of 123532. When gaming peripherals were added, performance degradation was clear: Cyberpunk 2077 dropped from 108 FPS (average) to 104 FPS (average) without RT, and from 47 FPS to 40 FPS (average) with RT enabled. The system startup time suffered significantly when peripherals were connected, taking 224 seconds (fully started) with peripherals versus 153 seconds out-of-box. System idle power draw increased dramatically when peripherals were connected, jumping from 35.34W (de-bloated) to 61.84W (de-bloated + peripherals), a 74% increase. The presenter ultimately concludes that while de-bloating is beneficial for idle power and startup time, adding numerous gaming peripherals negates these benefits, especially in power draw.

Context: The video investigates the impact of pre-installed software (bloatware) on a new Dell Tower Plus desktop by comparing its out-of-box performance against a system where bloatware has been removed and a security application, ThreatLocker, has been installed. The testing spans synthetic benchmarks (PCMark 10, Cinebench 2024, PugetBench, JetStream 2.2), gaming performance (Cyberpunk 2077), and system idle power consumption. A key part of the investigation involves testing the system both clean and with a suite of gaming peripherals connected to see how background processes and accessory drivers affect the baseline experience.