John Walkenbach has a few choice words about his new Dell laptop:
I spent about two hours removing all of the excess crap that’s installed on it. I thought I got it all, but when I booted it this morning, I was greeted with an advertisement featuring Scott Cook, from QuickBooks. The three buttons to click were: “See How Simple,” “Watch the Video,” and “Get Started Now.” Nothing that says, “Forget it, you ignorant moron.”
My initial impression is that I paid $1,100 for a box full of software and online service advertising. That computer is just packed with trial versions, and as you go through the set-up screens there’s a sales pitch at every opportunity. The worst is the Norton crap — it’s like a damn virus. It kept popping up, trying to scare me.
I hate this too. I asked some knowledgeable folks in the OEM computer industry once why Dell (and others) do this, and the answer was exactly what you’d expect: Dell and other big OEMs collect a fee from the software developer for every program that gets preinstalled. At 50 cents or a buck per program per PC sold, it adds up to a lot of money. Who cares whether it annoys the customer?
Like J-Walk, I remove all that crap on every computer I buy and on those I purchase and configure for other people. I cannot think of a single program among those trial versions that I have ever ordered, for myself or anyone else. I would pay extra for the privilege of getting a clean, uncluttered system. (And I am really looking forward to having exactly that experience on the new computer I just ordered from Mwave.com.)
Of course, Dell probably doesn’t even know that this practice pisses off their customers, because they don’t listen to feedback from people like J-Walk and me.
Ed Bott 
First step when you receive a new laptop: Reformat. Shouldn’t be that way, but there it is. I think it takes less time to reinstall the OS than to remove all of the crud.
My first inclination was to reformat and reinstall Windows, but it didn’t seem fair that I should have to buy another copy of Windows. Dell, of course, doesn’t include a Windows CD. And if you want a “recovery” CD, you need to create it yourself from the image on the hard drive. But that also includes the garbage I was trying to get rid of.
I spent two hours (yes, two hours) this morning at Dell chat and on the phone. The chat people kept telling me to use the phone, and the screwy phone menu didn’t have anything close to what I was trying to do (I tried orders, sales, and a few other things). Once I was put on hold and gave up after about 20 minutes. Somebody finally had the idea to have me call tech support rather than sales. I didn’t think it was a tech support issue, but apparently it is. I eventually got a guy who agreed to send me a Windows CD. I’ll believe it when it arrives.
The Latitude line is free of crap like MusicMatch or Norton. They also come with proper XP CDs. Not all the new bells and whistles of the Inspiron line but they’re usable out of the box and don’t really require a reformat.
This hits one of my major pet peeves. When I bought a new computer seven months ago, I also bought a copy of Windows XP Professional. I then wiped my hard drive clean and rebuilt it using my software. I like things to be lean and mean, not cluttered with the junk that OEMs put on computers.
Ed: We’ve been having a similar discussion about all of the crap-ware preinstalled by Toshiba on their Tablet PCs on our podcast and blogs between me, James Kendrick, Eric Mack, and Warner Crocker. And we all agree with you – this should be an option for customers – especially those who order a custom-built system. Give me a proper Windows install disk and forget the annoying trialware I’m just going to remove anyway.
My parents’ Packard Bell machine was like this too – it came with Norton Antivirus and Internet Security, the former with only 90 days of free updates and the latter set to pop up a message at every damn opportunity. You could uninstall them but only with Packard Bell’s own program since the uninstallers were on a hidden partition and didn’t appear in Add/Remove programs (hmmm, intuitive…)
Even then, there was some crap like Sonic Selector (some kind of paid-for custom internet radio streamer) which couldn’t be removed. All in all I spent a day removing crap from the machine – 60 day trial of Office 2003, plus all the Packard Bell branding – they’d branded the IE toolbar with some kind of purple pattern that made the text next to the buttons hard to read. Oh and getting onto the internet was fun as it was all set up for one particular dial-up ISP which we had no interest in.
The Optiplex line doesn’t have this, it seems to only be the consumer lines like Dimension and Inspiron. The last batch of GX620 we got were so clean I almost used their image, other than logoing the background and about boxes I could find no dell software on the machine.
The flip side is Toshiba. I will agree with the above commmenter. I build images for about 400 M200 tablets. The image from Toshiba is loaded with junk it is amazing. The worst part though is building a clean image isn’t easy for a tablet. There are about 30 apps to install and in Toshiba’s case need to be in order. Most of them enable very useful controls on the tablet.