Dell's "anti-crapware" initiative doesn't go far enough
section: common, for your questions: KezNews forum, 22.12.2007
My wife's small business has recently had a requirement to upgrade a couple of PCs, after 5 or 6 years. Since I am ultimately responsible for all their IT (and I am not proud of what they have - I cut all sorts of corners to make my life easy, but they don't know how lean it is).
I've always bought Dell kit for them since it's been good quality, relatively cheap, it's quick and easy.
Looking around on their site, I figured the new Dell Vostro desktop range might be worth a look - and since the machines were shipped with "Just the Software you need - no Trialware installed" then it would save me time in rebuilding the systems when they arrived (as I'd generally do).
There's a great discussion over on Steve Clayton's blog, about tweaking Vista, and on Computerworld on how to take the garbage off your new system. I'd hoped to avoid any of this by just going with a well-tested, modern, high-volume desktop, so that everything just works with software that's been available for the best part of a year, on Vista Business (no downgrade to Windows XP for us - even if Dell is now offering it as a "feature").
OOBE
The Out-Of-Box-Experience was typical of a decent PC - lots of boxes, lots of packaging, printed manuals in about a dozen languages (which all go straight in the bin). It's pretty straightforward plugging everything together now, and in no time we're up and running.
I bet if this was a new Mac, it would have a lot less spurious cables and bits of paper.
No Trial-ware but plenty of crap-ware
ZDnet has talked about the problems of "crapware" (including relative to Dell) cluttering up new PCs, slowing things down, frustrating end users and annoying power users by giving them hours of work to clean things up.
On starting up the PC, we had Google Desktop indexing everrything, even though Vista was doing that already. We had a Dell/Google Browser Helper Object just waiting to redirect every bad URL or search, to a site that showed Dell adverts (called Dell's Browser Address Redirector). Welcome to the world of "choice" - I'm almost surprised they didn't install Firefox, Opera and Safari, just in case the end user felt like installing a different browser without bothering to download it. Pity the users who don't want all this guff and have to take it off.
There are 3 separate ISP sign-up applications which are irrelevant to this small business, as well as a bunch of other bits & pieces which come from neither Dell nor Microsoft. Each of them has a program group in the start menu, and an entry in Control Panel's Remove Programs section.
There are obviously some useful 3rd party addons (though I was going to rip out the - trial version - McAfee anti-virus, spyware and firewall, and replace with OneCare), such as DVD decoder, or CD burner. But even they don't always work smoothly - there's some Roxio software which as well as writing CD/DVDs, also seems to monitor folders on disk for some sharing function.
These machines are sold for small business use - why would I want to have 3rd party software cluttering up the system tray and occupying memory & CPU, monitoring folders for sharing media, on the LAN? In looking to switch off the monitoring, I right-clicked on the system tray icon and (not seeing any other option), choose an option to do with Managing the folder sharing, on the basis that it might give me an option of switching it off.
Boom. Visual C++ 6.0 runtime error. Every time. On both machines.
I don't want to beat up on Dell specifically, but this is an example of a poor customer experience that is 100% down to the PC OEM to fix. Don't install all this software on a PC unless it's essential - or at least make it easy for users to revert to some kind of vanilla OS.source:
blogs.technet.com
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Comments(15)
clean install
asus pwns dell
the first thing to do after purchasing a pc is to wipe the hdd and then install one of
the eleven flavors of xp, minus any trial ware or crapware, and then add any needed apps
that aren't trial or crap...
and now... wipe and go with xp pro and the dell or any other unit will be 2x as fast and
you will have hours extra each day for golf or anything else you enjoy!
do they at least give you a windows install disk? some oems don't even bother to give
you that and just let you recover your system to their factory default with bonus
crapware.
not long ago, i purchased a new dell with xp home on it. the first thing i did was image
it, and then formatted and reinstalled xp pro. i made the image in case there were
problems in the warranty period. i could simply image back to dell's crappy system and
send it back.
this pc runs 24/7 and i have had no problems but it is a bunch
faster after starting off with a clean slate, no crapware, only the stuff i want! it's
the best way to have a stable, quick pc.
why won't computer companies sell a
pc with the windows disk and nothing installed........dell wanted more money for the pc
with no os than with xp, makes sense doesn't it?
only ignorant people buy dells. worse pcs ever, doesn't matter how cheap it is. i would
rather spend twice the money then to settle for half of a piece of crap dell sells. who
wants to pay and use $hit everyday?
ok u pretty much lost all my respect when u said you replaced macaffee with onecare. not
only is windows onecare garbage but so is macaffee. you did make some good points but that
was in forgivable to even mention windows live one care!!
even though you would unistall all the stuff u dont use its still gonna be a mess with
all the registry entries u have in the along with unused .dll files and what not. best to
just wipe the thing and start fresh.
i owned a g1 till i spilled beer on it; it was the best machine i owned, now i got a hp
hdx........hp spport = shit; hp has tons of crap ware btw, best thing to do is remove all
crap; then ghost when the system is stable and fast
the problem isn't just with dell. i have a dell pc which came preinstalled full of crap,
however i recently purchased a toshiba laptop with exactly the same problem.
i just spent one day messing around with a new dell my sister picked up for cheap. decent
hardware specs but the crapware is amazing. how the hell is one that does not know
anything but the internet suppose to deal with this shit. i mean hell remove all the dell
shit every ounce, all the 15 roxio links in add/remove, and all the other bullshit and
then run reg sweeper. i know to this day it would have been faster to start with a fresh
install.
anytime i buy a new laptop, first thing i do it pull the hd, install a clean one and
install everything fresh. if it has to go back for warranty or anything else, i put the
original drive back in.
cruise said: "not long ago, i purchased a new dell with xp home on it. the first thing i
did was image it, and then formatted and reinstalled xp pro"
so you don't
know how slow it actually was?
p51d007 : said: "...warranty or anything else,
i put the original drive back in."
so instead of bying a decent pc you buy a
cheap one, then buy another hd to make it work? why buy a cheap pc if you can buy a decent
one for the same amount of cash that you spend in the first place?
come on
people. we all know why there is crapware on your pc.
if you don't want crap?
buy it without the os. you get the freedos cd and a blank hd. buy the oem windows license
seperate and your done. it's no problem with warranty, no lost .dll's or anything. life
actually is simple.
(yes we buy dell for our company, but we are able to
install xp ourselves)
just beat the dell out of it!
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2 words for ya
By yoyoma on 23.12.2007 - 00:12