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« The Attack on Web Applications- Using Jedi Foresight | Main | Museum of Modern Betas- Coming Down The Pipe »

  • Dell Decrappifier- From Cluttered to Pristine

It appears this fellow isn't the only one tired of getting lots of "useful addons" on his new PC from Dell. Rather than ship a virgin system, Dell has money making deals to include certain forms of adware or sponsored search engines and they pocket the change.

This, in theory, is ok, depending on what the Dell EULA states, but what about users who do not want all of the extraneous stuff, trial installations and other unwanted programs? This person took matters into his own hands by by creating and running a very simple file.

Enter in the Dell Decrappifier, a script, that hopefully returns your PC back to its pristine state before all the marketing deals take over your coveted resources.

From their website:


It's a sad state of affairs when you buy a new computer these days and it comes pre-loaded with a ton of garbage software that brings your new machine to a crawl. If anyone's bought a Dell PC in the last few years, you probably know what I'm talking about. Just recently, I was helping a friend set up his brand new Inspiron 1300 and it took FOREVER for it to boot up. It's a very dissatifiying experience to pull a brand new computer out of the box and be spammed with a bunch of trial software. After removing all of the crap, (wich took a significant amount of time) it booted much faster and performed like it should. I kept thinking it would be nice to have an automated way to remove all this stuff. Thus was born the Dell De-Crapifier script.

Now, to be fair, I know most all of the major PC manufacturers have similar practices of installing trialware. I would suspect they don't make any profit on the hardware (or even a loss) and they make their money on the kickbacks from the software companies. I don't know.

Anyway, I wrote the Dell De-Crapifier using a great little scripting tool called AutoIT. You can use it to automate pretty much anything in Windows. There is also a cool editor called SciTE that gives you all the tools you need to put together a script. The best thing about this whole system is that you can generate stand alone executables that don't require a runtime.


dell-decrapifier-screenshot.jpg

Visit the Dell Decrappifier to see it in action. Read *carefully* before you download the file and use!


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