Toshiba Portege R700: A Truly Ultraportable 13.3"

Toshiba Portege R700—An Open Letter Regarding Bloatware

Dear Toshiba,

First off, I’d like to thank you for making a great ultraportable system. The Portege R700 is a very impressive piece of technology, especially with the Core i7 processor and solid state drive. I really love the light weight aluminum chassis, and the lower configurations are good values. The R700 gives the Toshiba line a standout product that is truly amongst the most highly featured ultraportables on the market.

Now I know that including bloatware on desktops, notebooks, and even smartphones has become the industry standard. People like McAfee, Symantec, AOL, and others are willing to pay you to toss their software onto your standard system image when you ship computers. I get it—it just makes business sense; you’re being paid to do basically no work. Everybody does it, from the biggest to the smallest, with the exception of those high rolling enterprise-class guys. Dell, HP, Sony, ASUS... nobody is immune to it and I’m not here to point any fingers. It’s not your fault for taking the effectively free money that is offered to you.

But this is getting a bit ridiculous. I fired up the R700 and found 91 running processes on boot. Ninety-one. Seriously, that’s insane. A well configured notebook should have between 40 and 50 running processes on boot, depending on how many utilities the manufacturer uses. On my personal use notebooks, I don’t even think I’ve seen 91 processes running EVER, even with 20 instances of Google Chrome running. It’s enough to bring the R700, even this high end SKU, to it’s knees while not doing much of anything. To say it’s pretty disappointing to see a $1600 notebook with top shelf components crawling through the most mundane tasks would be an understatement of epic proportions.

So please, in the future, don’t load your computers up with quite so much bloatware. It really kills the out-of-box experience for the end user.

Regards and thanks again for the otherwise great notebook,

Vivek Gowri