Domain: pcdecrapifier.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to pcdecrapifier.com.
Comments · 58
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Re:Laptop specs - Linky Linky
Hmm, that is my laptop in a big box. Anyhoo, Dell also sells some PCs with a 'no trailware' option. It seems that manufacturers are seeing the light. I wonder how much the 'PC Decrapifier' project has to do with this change of heart.
http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/ -
Don't sell the students short
With a 250 watt power supply, a gig of RAM and only 80 GB of hard drive it's probably going to leave a lot of students disappointed. I don't know why everyone figures that just because students don't do weather simulations they can get by with just any junk hardware. The OS needs bags of RAM just to run right and OpenOffice (just like MS Office) needs ram and cpu power to do its work. Looks like another case of Walmart putting the screws to a supplier to squeeze dollars out of a product. I'm just mostly anti-walmart, not completely. I don't like Dell much either, but I'd just as soon head over there for a back-to-school special then decrapify it. More likely than anything, I'll just keep building my own.
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Re:I'm not experiencing this at all...
A handy tool for sorting out Dell PC's can be found on this website. It even has a cool name. Sorted a colleague of mine's laptop real good.
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Use PC Decrapifier
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Decrapify it
If you don't want to reinstal: http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/ My mother in law bought one. Now I am used to your anti-virus no longer getting updated if you don't pay. But when her spamkiller expired, her email stopped working . And I can assure you there is NO WAY she would have been able to fix that herself without paying.
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Re:But why do we need these in the first place?
Maybe I'm an old stick in the mud. But I've had far, far more trouble CAUSED by most of these applications than I've seen prevented.
Ain't that the truth.
I bought a couple of Dulls last year, a desktop for me and a laptop for the wife. I turned mine on long enough to ensure that it worked, then wiped the drive and installed Ubuntu. The wife wanted XP, so the first thing I installed was the Dell De-crapifier, an earlier version of the PC De-crapifier. Off came gigabytes worth of crapware, including the McAfee internet security suite, as bloated a POS as you will ever find. (Except for maybe the Norton internet security suite.)
Then I installed the free versions of AVG Antivirus, Ad-Aware and Spybot. AVG works well and is much less bloated than McAfee and Norton. Other than all the screwing around to make it stable and secure, we have never had a problem with the laptop.
However it is annoying to have to delete tons of garbage no sane person would ever want. It is annoying that Windows is so insecure. It is annoying to have to depend on Windows Update when Microsoft uses it frogmarch their users onto new software (e.g. IE 7, WGA) that has nothing to do with security. It is annoying having to go to so many different websites for software updates.
I have three linux boxes, 2 Ubuntu and one Ipcop firewall. That one Windows laptop requires more babysitting than all the linux boxes put together.
People complain about computer viruses, computer worms, computer trojans, computer instability, computer insecurity, computer crapware, computer bloatware. Et cetera.
To that I say :%s/computer/Windows/g -
spam spam spam Ubuntu and spam -- without the spam
Bloatware and spyware on a Linux system is something I had hoped I'd never get to see. The same goes for anti-spyware. If Dell includes them it will trigger a dirty vicious cycle.
Never fear. If Dell ships Ubuntu with crap, then the community will quickly come up with a linux version of the PC Decrapifier" that people use to remove the bloatware from windows-based Dell PCs.
Of course, I'd rather see Dell not ship the crap to begin with. But if the crap lets Dell sell me the box for 10% less, I'll take it with the crap and remove it myself. Or just wipe the box and install my distro of choice. -
Re:Now if only...
"You do realize that all that nagware crap subsidizes the cost of the hardware, don't you? All that crap is exactly why Dells are worth buying. One wipe, which I'd be doing anyways, and it's all gone."
It's a lot easer to run PC Decrapifier:
http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/
It's free and it works.