Bloatware may eat up essential system resources from the task at hand.Alternatives are more streamlined for your purposes, run faster, and give you better results. If all you do with software such as Photoshop is a little cropping, adding captions and colour correction, Paint.net will do the job using less than half the resources, and never running out of scratch disk space.

On a desktop this may seem unimportant, but on laptops and netbooks with limited processing power and hard disk space, this becomes absolutely vital. Another important aspect is privacy and bandwidth usage. Windows Media Player from Microsoft, and the CS3 suite by Adobe, are both known to have sent discreet packets of data over the net, with details on usage. While the license agreements state that personal information is not collected in this usage, and that it is done solely to improve the software itself, they are taking up a small portion of your bandwidth. Software from lesser companies have been called spyware for doing exactly the same.

Automated updates often take up a considerable share of the bandwidth. Weekly definition updates of most antivirus software is somewhere in the range of 20 MB. For careful users, who are smart about their external drives and web habits, this is just a waste of space and bandwidth.