Dell Bloatware Remover

Here's a potential useful tool said to remove Dell bloatware:

Dell Decr@pifier Spelling modified to satisfy NBR filter.

Sorry, haven't tried it, still waiting for the new HD full of bloat.

Hermit

 

Thanks for posting this, looks promising. Can't wait to mess with it. Good find!

 

does this only work on dells?

 

Thanks.....

 

I don't have a Dell machine handy right now, but if anyone gets a chance to try this out I'd love to know if it works well or not for them.

 

If I get a chance, I'll try it out tonight. I'm just afraid it'll remove a few things I want (like the DVD software).

Does anybody know if there is any chance that this may have a malware aspect to it?

 

I don't think there's much chance of it being malware, reading through the guy's blog that created this shows many comments from people with questions and feedback and it's open source. I doubt it would uninstall the DVD software, might want to post and ask on the guys blog if no one here has used it.

 

Please post of you have used this yet and tell us how it went. When I get my E1505 in a week or so, I am gonna do it right away (I really don't want to remformat it right when i get it)

 

I downloaded it and poked around a little. Some thoughts:

• Its a text file, very small [18KB]
• Its intended to be run as a script file, no experience here
• It was designed for the Dell Inspiron 1300, whatever that is
• Since I've reinstalled XP MCE "a hundred times" in the last month, I'll go that way

Hermit

 

Dang.. I just got my 710m on monday.. could have tested this out.. already formatted though..

 

I just ran it on my 2-day old e1505. It took about 2-3 minutes to run. I saw it remove Corel photo album, google desktop, AOL, NetZero, and Music Match jukebox. Then I got a phone call, so it might've removed something else while I was talking. Here are my before & after stats...

Before-
~1:35 to boot and launch all background applications
7.75 GB of hard drive used
15 Items in system tray
67 processes running, using 364 MB

After
~1:07 to boot and launch apps
7.68 GB of HD used
10 items in tray
58 processes running using 324 MB

It is a start, but just looking on my desktop I see "Learn with dell", play games, Trend Micro PC-cillin, Corel Paint Shop X (is that any good?).

Are PC-cillin or paint shop useful?

In the system tray, I have Dell Quick Set (whatever that is), windows security alerts, PC cillin internet security, Local area connection icon with red X, Net Waiting (is that call waiting when using a modem?) bluetooth manager, intel proset wireless icon, pointing device icon, volume control, and the power meter.

 

cool, thanks for running that and posting this feedback. the guy that wrote the script indicated it was designed for the B130 and as such would only remove stuff he had on that notebook, as Dell adds different things obviously the remove command would have to be added to the script. As you say though, a good start and quicker than doing it manually. Much quicker boot time too. That "Play Games", "Learn with Dell" and "Corel Paint Shop" are not something you'll want, the play games stuff is especially awful -- it's from some Wild Tangent (or something) company that's a startup and somehow raised enough VC money to pay Dell and HP to install their worthless game software on new PCs. The Dell Quickset can actually be useful, it allows you to configure your preferred power modes/settings when plugged in versus on battery along with some other stuff. I recommend checking it out. Oh, and I'm not sure about the PC-cillin, probably not something you want.

 

Good info @dam. I didn't run the program, but I manually unistalled most of the ****. More importantly, for the quickest startup, I recommend editing your startup list with MSConfig. I only have 9 items starting up, resulting in 7 items in tray:


Here is the pic of my startup list:


My startup time was 34 sec (to Welcome screen) and 52 sec to my profile logged in with all 7 items in the systray and 52 processes running.

Of the apps you have in your tray, I disabled the Dell Quick Set (you can access the power settings via the screen saver properties menu), NetWaiting (I don't use the modem), synaptics touchpad pointing device icon (get all the functionality I need without loading the touchpad interface at startup).

Happy cleansing...

Update: I re-enabled the Synaptics touchpad startup to re-enable touchpad scrolling. Only lost about 1 sec on the startup. You can disable the systray icon via the pointing device menu via the control panel if you don't like it.

 

This deal is open source (obviously) and if people start adding to the scripts for everything that ships w/ Dell it could become pretty solid.

The only problem is there's going to be stuff that a small % of people need that couldn't be set up to auto-uninstall even though you probably won't want it.

 

my opinion is that it's always best to format.
uninstalling stuff doesn't get the registry back to how it was. it'll still be a little slow

 

yes, i agree withh syxbit, reformating is the best thing to do! Right now, with IE7, WMP, MSN, and a few other things running i only have 31 processes going on, right after reformating it felt like i added another 512mb of ram!

having said that, i about had to go online and download all the drivers becasue i thought i didn't copy them to cd correctly, so its prolly a little safer to go this route unless u know what you are doing.

 

Cool. Pretty interesting. But won't formatting be better because you would be able to only install the softwares that you wanted.