So what's the deal with Dell's preinstalled software?

manoz · 15 Jan 2007 at 04:35

I hear a lot of stories about Dell's huge amount of lame and annoying software that comes preinstalled. Question is, does Dell's laptops/desktop come with recovery software or have any method that allows you to just have the barebones OS? Cheers for the info.

tolien · 15 Jan 2007 at 08:48

You have to pay for the CDs as an option (if you don't pay I hope you'd get a recovery CD - or else you'd be screwed if it broke :eek:

).

Mine came with a Windows XP CD and a "Drivers and Utilities" CD (though I was £5 the poorer for the privilege), but my Latitude D820 didn't come with any crud on it anyway - I guess they think the business customers don't want an AOL trial...

eveyuk · 15 Jan 2007 at 09:09

manoz said:
I hear a lot of stories about Dell's huge amount of lame and annoying software that comes preinstalled. Question is, does Dell's laptops/desktop come with recovery software or have any method that allows you to just have the barebones OS? Cheers for the info.

Just phone support after the machine arrives, they will post you the CDs free.

Cuchulain · 15 Jan 2007 at 09:12

manoz said:
I hear a lot of stories about Dell's huge amount of lame and annoying software that comes preinstalled. Question is, does Dell's laptops/desktop come with recovery software or have any method that allows you to just have the barebones OS? Cheers for the info.

It took me around an hour to remove most of the crap that Dell had preinstalled on my work machine and it didn't come with any form of recovery CD

dagwoood · 15 Jan 2007 at 09:22

You could try PC Decrapifier; the guy originally wrote this to get rid of the pre-installed rubbish that comes with Dell pc's.

Meatball · 15 Jan 2007 at 09:47

My friends HP came with a lot of rubbish on it. It ranged from crud a DVD player, Hp photosmart software, "make this computer kid friendly", "connect this computer to the internet", a norton internet 2006 trial and much more. I cut the running processes down from 53 to 32 easily but I couldn't do a full format because it has XP Media centre (I dont have a disk)

Welshy · 15 Jan 2007 at 10:09

tolien said:
You have to pay for the CDs as an option (if you don't pay I hope you'd get a recovery CD - or else you'd be screwed if it broke ).

Mine came with a Windows XP CD and a "Drivers and Utilities" CD (though I was £5 the poorer for the privilege), but my Latitude D820 didn't come with any crud on it anyway - I guess they think the business customers don't want an AOL trial...

You had to pay for your CDs? When was this?

I got a laptop from them 18 months ago, and wanted the XP CD so that i could reformat and get rid of all the crap that we're talking about. I sent them an email, and they posted me it all in CD form, even the useless utilities they had installed on it in the first place

gumbald · 15 Jan 2007 at 10:26

I took a few hours just removing stuff when I first got it, then took an image of the drive.

tolien · 15 Jan 2007 at 10:34

Welshy said:
You had to pay for your CDs? When was this?

Last October or so. Twas an option, along with MS Office and all the other options.

Edit: It was £3 not £5, but hm.

GuruJockStrap · 15 Jan 2007 at 11:01

I purchased my laptop from Dell in the summer and it never came with the original XP CD's or a basic recovery CD. Instead, the factory installation was in a hidden partition on the HD. If you needed to recover, you just hit a key during boot up to begin the process.

The amount of junk Dell put on there is amazing. After the first boot, Windows reported a staggering 60 running processes! :eek:

My desktop PC only has 29!

I just completely formatted the Laptop HD, including the hidden recovery partition and just installed my own version of Windows. Runs like lightening now.

Carter · 15 Jan 2007 at 11:14

Recently got a laptop from Dell, got a recovery CD and a windows only CD, with instructions on how to do a factory restore or a clean install of windows.

Took nearly 10 minutes to boot the first time I used it, 57 processes running.

Energize · 15 Jan 2007 at 15:07

Meatball said:
My friends HP came with a lot of rubbish on it. It ranged from crud a DVD player, Hp photosmart software, "make this computer kid friendly", "connect this computer to the internet", a norton internet 2006 trial and much more. I cut the running processes down from 53 to 32 easily but I couldn't do a full format because it has XP Media centre (I dont have a disk)

My hp laptop is a business one and it still came with crap like, hp protect tools, powerdvd and yes the norton 2006 trial.

manoz · 15 Jan 2007 at 16:19

Thanks, looks like Dell can at least deal with customer CD requests eventhough it might come at a price. Whatever they charge, if they do, it'll be worth it no doubt.

No-One · 15 Jan 2007 at 19:23

My Inspiron 9200 came with a few various ISP stuff, dvd player, etc. If I ever need to reinstall I just restore from the restore partition, go on an uninstall frenzy then put my own stuff on it.

Welshy · 15 Jan 2007 at 20:29

Cannot fault Dells customer service at all, very good.

I managed to spill a pint on my laptop last year (don't ask), and they sent an engineer within a few days to replace a few parts. Still didnt work, so they came and collected it a couple of days later, and it was back with me in a week or so