Pre-Installed Software Hades

[roo_ster]

Howdy:

So THIS is the crapware hades most buyers of Dell must wade through? 

My current task involves playing with a non-IT/non-ususally acquisitioned laptop for a program. I aim to install RHEL5/centos5 linux on it and see how it works with some apps.

Before I started, however, I wanted to boot in the factory OS (WinXP Pro) to get the hardware specs: RAM, graphics card, HD size, GB NIC, etc)

Holy pre-installed crapware, Batman!.  This Dell,  top-of-the-line, fastest laptop in we could find is the most annoying machine I have ever booted up.  After 5 minutes of dealing with the crapware, I wanted to smash in the LCD.

I never experienced this on my wife's laptop, as I knew the specs before I bought it, had the drivers, and never booted into the factory OS (WinXP Home).  I am surprised no one has firebombed Dell in frustration.

I don't eve want to know how many CPU cycles & memory all that crapware eats.

[K Frame]

when I bought my new desktop two years ago I didn't pay attention to the RAM, and left it at 256k.

A few months later Mtnbkr helped me with a virus issue and pointed out that by virtue of the fact that I turned the machine on I buried the memory.

So, he flushed a bunch of the crap and I bought a gig of memory and installed it. (Yeah, I know, I should have bought 50 billion gig, more is always better...)

[Phyphor]

Doesn't the website for the laptop have a list of hardware specs? You should be able to search for that specific model on Dell's website for the spec sheet.

That said, yes, pre-installed crapware is my bane.  Most systems I work on for folks have it in droves, and they never use any of it.  When told they could save a lot of HD space / RAM / CPU cycles by removing it, they almost always answer "Doesn't the computer need that stuff?"

Case in point: HP's desktops and that god-awful bar/clock thing.  As if the default windows clock at the bottom of the screen wasn't good enough, HP has to load some honkin' RAM hog at startup.  The last machine I dealt with that had that crap on it gained something like 20 seconds or more on startup after all the HP stuff was suppressed (msconfig is your friend!)

[charby]

Most of the confusers I buy are Dell. The easiest way to get specs for any Dell is to go to there website, create an account then use the support options and enter the service tag. You will get a list of what the computer came from the factory with.

-C

[Gewehr98]

You could barely find a place to click on the taskbar with my 2006 Dell Inspiron 6000 notebook, there was so much crapware pre-installed.

Not only that, but Dell had a hidden partition on the hard drive (good-sized, too!) as part of their restore function, in addition to the restore CD-ROMs that bought things back to the as-shipped configuration.

It sucked when you opened the Task Manager's Performance Tab, and X percent of the system was running the background tasks while just idling, and my 1 Gig of memory (obviously pretty weak according to some here at APS) was eaten up by the same crapware. 

I uninstalled the majority of it, save for the Dell updates, because my machine's still under the extended warranty.  If I ever need any of the crapware again, I'll just run the restore utility or insert one of the restore CD-ROMs.  Otherwise, good riddance!

[SomeKid]

My current PC was built by someone I knew, and upgraded by a friend - mainly so I could avoid the pre-installed crap. Dell would be much richer if he did not pre-install stuff, because I know I am not the only person who walked away from his company because of the stuff he puts on the PC.

Not too bad. It has been about 3 or 4 years since my friend did his work, I probably need to upgrade it some more...I only have 120gigs on the HD, and 2gigs of ram.

[roo_ster]

Yep, I know I could have gotten the info from Dell.com, but I wanted to see if the thing even booted.

If there were any HW problems, I wanted to get them diagnosed & the laptop back to Dell before I monkeyed with the factory OS to preclude Dell "support" from blaming linux drivers for non-functioning HW.

The laptop now has a fresh install of centos/RHEL 5.  I will do the same for its two brothers.  My aim is to examine three disk/partition schemes:
1. No encryption
2. Corp-mandated PGP whole-disk encryption (which supposedly can work on linux boxes with ext2/3 format partitions)
3. Data & swap partition encryption using the the centos/RHEL capability (LUKS).

I plan on running some of the benchmarks that are common to linux performance as well as our applications.  I want to see what sort of performance hit the encryption causes in the various configs.

I will do a similar pre- & post PGP analysis when the IT PGP mafia comes to see me later in the week for my issue laptop.  They have already done the IT-equivalent of leaving a horse's head in my bed, but I gave them the engineer-equivalent of an obscene Sicilian gesture while telling them, "You can have my laptop only after I am done with the 10-day turn-around proposal effort.  If you have a problem that, talk to the president of our business unit."

[MechAg94]

Our company buys from Dell.  Our IT guys have their own drive images they install though.  I think they also restrict the models available internally.

[mtnbkr]

It's been a while, but Dell used to preload a corporate image for you.  We got our laptops straight from Dell with the corporate compliment of software (and no junk) preinstalled and ready to go.

Chris

[K Frame]

"corporate compliment of software"

So, your corporate people were saying nice things about your software.

That's good... 

[mtnbkr]

Thank you Professor Pedantic.

Chris

[RevDisk]

Our company buys from Dell.  Our IT guys have their own drive images they install though.  I think they also restrict the models available internally.

That's what we do.  For ease of management, security and performance.  Takes a bit of time to get the ghost images perfect, but very simple to crank out additional computers after the ghosting is done.  Dell does offer to pre-load your image file at the factory.  We prefer our own techs.

And good techs should restrict the models available to as few as humanly possible.  Uniformity eases the hardware issues that pop up.  Plus less drivers, ghost images, etc etc.

[Boomhauer]

My Inspiron 6400, which I purchased from Dell, also had a bunch of junk. I got rid of it too.

Hey, does anybody know of a good (free) program to help me shut down the unimportant stuff that is running in the background? I know they are out there, but not what they are called...

[Sindawe]

To keep stuff from starting up that I do want to have available for occasional use, I use the MSConfig utility.  I also use Process Explorer ( http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/ProcessExplorer.mspx ) to kill errant processes and things like the iPod service after a reboot.

[MechAg94]

About the only bug I know about that my coworder and former boss complain about:  There computer won't work with overhead projector we have.  When they try to run powerpoint, it auto-resizes everything to maximum zoom.  My computer is one model older and never has an issue.  Pretty funny though.

[roo_ster]

This wasn't an issue laptop.  Our issue machines (laptops & workstations) come from Compaq/HP at 150% of retail.

HP did not offer anything that fit our requirements, which were non-negotiable since we had signed a contract with the customer saying we would have a mobile demo capability.

Our IT folks craft images for the machines, though some images are better than others.  For instance, the image on my issue laptop came with a neutered version of Sonic RecordNOW that could not burn boot disks or .iso images from the hard drive.  WTF, over?

Anyways, I have good relations with our local IT guys.  It is the corporate clowns that need a tarring & feathering.  You'd think a corporate IT dept of a tech/engineering firm would understand that every once in a while,  standard HW & OS solutions for the bleeding-edge development work we do might not cut the muster.  Or that mandating across-the-board solutions could seriously edanger our ability to meet contractual obligations.

It is just another example of support functions thinking the business revolves around themselves.  Don't get me started about our finance trolls.  They have been a juggernaut of arrogance and "no-ism" since sarbox came online.

[RevDisk]

Hey, does anybody know of a good (free) program to help me shut down the unimportant stuff that is running in the background? I know they are out there, but not what they are called...

AutoRuns, from Microsoft.  Lil more advanced, it sees basically everything that starts up with your computer.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/Autoruns.mspx

This wasn't an issue laptop.  Our issue machines (laptops & workstations) come from Compaq/HP at 150% of retail.

HP did not offer anything that fit our requirements, which were non-negotiable since we had signed a contract with the customer saying we would have a mobile demo capability.

Did your company sign any enterprise agreements with HP?  Or is it just company policy to only buy HP products?  My boss would have my head on a platter if I intentionally bought something, ANYTHING at 150% of retail without a very good explaination. 

Our IT folks craft images for the machines, though some images are better than others.  For instance, the image on my issue laptop came with a neutered version of Sonic RecordNOW that could not burn boot disks or .iso images from the hard drive.  WTF, over?

Anyways, I have good relations with our local IT guys.  It is the corporate clowns that need a tarring & feathering.  You'd think a corporate IT dept of a tech/engineering firm would understand that every once in a while,  standard HW & OS solutions for the bleeding-edge development work we do might not cut the muster.  Or that mandating across-the-board solutions could seriously edanger our ability to meet contractual obligations.

It is just another example of support functions thinking the business revolves around themselves.  Don't get me started about our finance trolls.  They have been a juggernaut of arrogance and "no-ism" since sarbox came online.

Generally, you need to create a different image per model.  Theoretically it is possible to make a multi-platform ghost image, but I wouldn't recommend it. 

Eh, the corporate IT folks answer to management and beancounters.  The technical aspects of the job are easy, fighting the beancounters is another story.   We're told to standardize to cut costs, or told to buy any "special" under the sun.  Heck, we were told to standardize on Cisco layer 3 switches ($3.8k a pop) for a brief period of time, until we explained it'd run well over $300k and cripple our bandwidth capacity.    One-off projects vastly annoy some desk jockeys. 

SOX compliance is a freakin nightmare, especially IT wise.  We just started it, and we're creating policies left and right now.  It's a good idea in principle, a nightmare in reality.

[DJJ]

Right now, there are 40 processes, all with cryptic names, running on my Dell, according to the Task Manager. If I knew what all that crap was, and what it really does, I'd probably get rid of it too.

I've also tried msconfig, but it keeps telling me I don't have administrative privileges - never mind the fact that I'm the freakin' owner, and my account says, "Administrator".

[Bogie]

Guys, don't cry...
 
My last job, they didn't have a problem with my stuffing tonzo RAM in the box... But try to buy a hard drive larger than 20-30 gigs? It was like you thought you were special or something...
 
I ended up buying one myself, because the IT folks gave me a massive 5 gigs of server space.

To run graphic design for 1200 researchers and support staff, including the job of site photog...
 

[Jamisjockey]

Wow....I just bought my second Dell.  My laptop was a refurb and came with the bare necessities and a few discs.  My second PC for my home office was an off-the-shelf E521.  No BS in it, either....My HP procured through Circuit city came with 10x more useless *expletive deleted*it buried it in than the Dells, combined.

[RocketMan]

SOX compliance is a freakin nightmare, especially IT wise.  We just started it, and we're creating policies left and right now.  It's a good idea in principle, a nightmare in reality.

That is the bleedin' truth.  Another whole batch of unintended consequences coming out of that piece (os) legislation.

[roo_ster]

This wasn't an issue laptop.  Our issue machines (laptops & workstations) come from Compaq/HP at 150% of retail.

Did your company sign any enterprise agreements with HP?  Or is it just company policy to only buy HP products?  My boss would have my head on a platter if I intentionally bought something, ANYTHING at 150% of retail without a very good explaination. 

Eh, the corporate IT folks answer to management and beancounters.  The technical aspects of the job are easy, fighting the beancounters is another story.   We're told to standardize to cut costs, or told to buy any "special" under the sun.  Heck, we were told to standardize on Cisco layer 3 switches ($3.8k a pop) for a brief period of time, until we explained it'd run well over $300k and cripple our bandwidth capacity.    One-off projects vastly annoy some desk jockeys. 

SOX compliance is a freakin nightmare, especially IT wise.  We just started it, and we're creating policies left and right now.  It's a good idea in principle, a nightmare in reality.

Compaq/HP has a sweetheart deal with our company due to the close history of the companies.  Kinda like the old Ford/Firestone deal, but at outrageous cost to us.

SarbOx is a pox on businesses, investors, and employees in the USA.  It has driven up compliance costs (in terms of # beancounter hours) and driven up the cost of doing business when employees & managers try to figure out how to game the system (lease as much as possible or make what you buy REALLY EXPENSIVE).

Take a gander at where, historically IPOs have occurred.   Then look at where they have been occurring since SarbOx, cursed be their names, came online.

[Phyphor]

Wow....I just bought my second Dell.  My laptop was a refurb and came with the bare necessities and a few discs.  My second PC for my home office was an off-the-shelf E521.  No BS in it, either....My HP procured through Circuit city came with 10x more useless *expletive deleted*it buried it in than the Dells, combined.

HP stands for Heavily Packed.

or maybe Holy *expletive deleted*ck!

In any case, I absolutely *HATE* the sheer amount of crap they heave onto those things.

And wasting a large part of your HD with a recovery partition? Screw.  That.

They ought to install another HD with all that crap in the machine, or give you the CDs to reinstall the machine.

[Brian Williams]

SpyBot Search and Destroy has a good startup killer built in.

[roo_ster]

SBS&D is good stuff.