Lots of people are having problems with their computers and many of them are caused by the applications they have installed. Some hate the fact that, all of a sudden, their documents are opened with another application instead of Word, or their movies are opened by some other application instead of the one they are used to. Others have problems with their browser not working properly due to some strange toolbars. Others receive lots of annoying messages at startup. All these kinds of problems are caused by the fact that, when installing applications, many people blindly click on the Next button until the installation ends. In this article I will give you five reasons why doing this is a very bad practice which leads to countless problems. Hopefully, I will manage to convince you to stop for a few seconds and read the windows & messages you receive during the installation of any application.

• Bloatware Crippling Your PC - your Windows will suffer from software bloat leading to decreasing performance and a bad user experience. Many programs, especially the free ones, will try to install additional software on your PC. Common examples include toolbars for your internet browser or trial versions of security solutions. You can see a very valid example in the screenshot below.

  

  There's not much space left for viewing webpages, is it? If you don't want to end up having similar problems, make sure you uncheck any proposals to install additional software you will never use.

• Default Programs and File Associations are Often Changed - there are many applications which offer similar functionality but users install them because they want to use one specific feature, not all of them. For example, I use Winamp to listen to music but I do not use it to play video files even though it can do this. For playing video files I always prefer Windows Media Player Classic or KMPlayer. If I install Winamp using the default installation options, it overrides the settings for playing video files. Therefore, each time I double click on a video it is opened with Winamp instead of KMPlayer. To fix this, I need to set the default programs again for all types of video files. Instead of doing this, it is much easier to pay a bit of attention when installing an application and check if it sets itself as the default program for opening files which I want to open with other applications.
• Browser Homepage & Default Search Engine are Often Changed - there are plenty of applications which will change the homepage or default search engine used by your browser when they are installed. This is not necessarily a huge problem but it can be very annoying at some point. Instead of having to set your browser back to the way it was, it is easier to un-check any option which would set your homepage or default search engine.
• Many Useless Shortcuts - many applications use to install lots of shortcuts in many places: the desktop, start menu, quick launch, startup, etc. Using the default installation options means having way too many shortcuts referring to the same application. If you want to have the shortcuts on your desktop there's no point in having them in other places as well. Some applications also install shortcuts to web sites or other products you will never use. This just consumes precious work space and you end up spending more time searching for what you need because the desktop, start menu and quick launch are too cluttered to find anything in. All these problems can be easily solved by paying a bit of attention when you install your applications. All it takes is to un-check the shortcuts you don't want to have installed.
• Less Disk Space & Lower Performance - using the Typical installation options means you will install features, shortcuts and additional applications you will never use. All of these consume additional space which is wasted and remains unused. In such cases, neither Disk Cleanup nor CCleaner can help much. These tools will cleanup files, not applications you don't use. Another bad habit of Typical installations is the fact that they tend to make applications run at startup. More applications running at startup means lower performance. In such cases the effort it takes to Streamline your Startup Applications & Improve Windows Performance is much higher than spending a few additional seconds to go for Custom installations and configure them correctly.

Conclusion

As I have shown above, there are plenty of reasons why you should not install your applications using Typical installation options. Instead of selecting Typical or Full installation, it is always better to click on Custom. Spending a bit of time on using Custom installation options and choosing only what you need to have installed, goes a long way in keeping both the performance of your system and your productivity at high levels. The effort it takes to do so is minimal and the improvement will be noticed very easily. Less features and applications installed means more performance, better usability and improved productivity when working on your PC.

Related articles:
Add/Remove Programs - nowhere to be found?
How to add and remove Windows Vista features
How to uninstall Windows Vista updates
How to set your default programs
Streamline your Startup Applications & Improve Windows Performance

Recommended articles:
How to decrapify your new Windows PC