MS Will Remove OEM 'Crapware' For $99

walterbyrd writes about a program from Microsoft to clean up bloated base installs, for a price. From the article: "Microsoft even offers up numbers to show how detrimental this OEM-installed crapware is to your system. Microsoft claims that Signature systems start up 39 percent faster, go into sleep mode 23 percent faster, and resume from sleep a whopping 51 percent faster compared to their crapware-ladened counterparts. (A 'Signature' system is one without crapware). But now, Microsoft will offer customers the opportunity to give their Windows 7 PC the Signature treatment by bringing it to a Microsoft Store and paying $99, according to the Wall Street Journal."

Comments

We do it at our store for $65 plus tax.

[vwpau227]

I'm sure we are not alone, along with other computer stores in the area, we do a "wipe and reload" of the OEM Windows (XP, Vista, or 7) for $65 plus the applicable taxes, and we'll even load the latest service pack for Windows on the computer. It can make the computer run faster, but frankly I don't think it is really necessary for most new computer systems. The Acer TravelMate and Acer Veriton (business class) systems that we sell comes with very little in terms of additional OEM bundled software.

Re:We do it at our store for $65 plus tax.

[__aaltlg1547]

I did it to my Dell at home for free.

Re:We do it at our store for $65 plus tax.

[NiceGeek]

Ah, hyperbole. "Every couple of weeks"? Since I installed Win 7 on my PC, I've been asked to authorize it exactly *once* and I've even swapped out the motherboard since the initial install.

Re:We do it at our store for $65 plus tax.

[Anonymous Coward]

....I swear, I used to love HP printers. But lately I haven't seen a "driver only' install in place. It's always dozens of programs monitoring and reporting on printer things... paper, ink/toner and all that. Still not as bad as a Xerox program which consistently prevented a machine from shutting down normally, but it's kind of ridiculous.

I've never had an issue just getting just the printer drivers. Even if it comes with the "install everything" disk, doesn't mean you have to.

Explore the CD, quite sure somewhere there is a folder called "drivers".

From the 2008R2 Print server at work for the MFP's there is a generic x86/x64 driver. Windows 7 seems to have most drivers installed as default. My Epson 6100 laser printer is an example of that.

Re:We do it at our store for $65 plus tax.

[hairyfeet]

Actually friend its really not, you just haven't had anyone show you the correct way to do so. before you do a wipe and reinstall you need to go to WSUS Offline and have it download any patches and service packs you need for later. In mine I have every patch and service pack from Win2K through Win 7 X64 so no problems there, just launch once a month to have it update the latest patches. If you use MS Office you can have the service packs and patches included with WSUS, same with MSE antivirus. At this point you can download the latest drivers if you wish, but I only go for the graphics and wireless usually as I've found some of the OEM drivers for sound and NICs to be more buggy than the Windows defaults.

Next once the OS is installed you run WSUS, depending on how far behind your OS disc is from current this could take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour but since its all automated who cares. My discs have the last service packs already so only the patches after the last release are needed, about 30 minutes or so depending on the system. after that has finished and you see all the drivers are checked out you simply go to Ninite and pick any of the third party stuff you need,browser, Libre office, codecs, flash, whatever. the only third party I use that I don't get from Ninite is either Pale moon (a Firefox fork compiled for newer CPUs) or Comodo Dragon (Chromium based with some nice security features) but since I have both of those on my network drive along with WSUS no time there. Once that is installed i go to Ninite and pick Klite, flash, Hulu TV (my customers enjoy having Internet TV) LO, Foxit, and PDF Creator. I usually give them Comodo Internet Security but if you use MSE or Avast you can just skip that step or grab Avast at Ninite.

Voila! You are talking about maybe an hour, hour and a half tops and since the majority of it is fully automated you only have to look in once in a while and see if you are ready for the next step. Since I usually have the systems on my KVM all I have to do is click over once in a while, couldn't be simpler friend. That is why I only charge $50 plus tax for the same service MSFT is wanting $100 for so I don't see why MSFT couldn't do it even quicker and cheaper than me.

Re:We do it at our store for $65 plus tax.

[Iamthecheese]

I looked into it once. Drivers for every nearly related printer in every language, an extra bloated install program to choose which the user probably needs, spyware, more spyware, drivers for related all-in-ones, extra bloated "user friendly" crap, useless programs supposed to be usable for things like screen capture, photo editing, scanning, photo archiving, thumbnails, and sample data.

Re:We do it at our store for $65 plus tax.

[oyenamit]

Go to hp.com and navigate to the Support and Drivers section and then to Drivers and Software section. Search for your printer product number. You would be presented with a page that lists all the available downloads for your printer. Look for the section Driver. If you are lucky (like this page), the download under this section should be in 10-30 MB range. If so, it includes just the driver and nothing else (no installer etc). You will have to manually initiate installation of your printer and point to this package when prompted for the driver files.

In case you are not so lucky (like this page), there will be no option to download a driver only package. Instead, you will have to download the full software. Nevertheless, it should not be difficult to locate the actual driver in this package by searching for .INF files. After that, just manually initiate installation of the printer.

I don't know how much the concept of universal drivers has caught on, but HP provides drivers which can print to a variety of different physical printer devices. So, instead of downloading a different driver each for your different printers, you just install one HP Universal Printer Driver. This driver can print to all of your printers. It reduces maintenance effort since you need to update only 1 driver. Universal drivers are especially useful in office environments.

I am not sure where the drivers marked "IT professionals only" come from.

PC Decrapifier: Free

[Sarusa]

http://pcdecrapifier.com/

I tell everyone who gets a pre-installed PC to run this.

Discussed on Windows Weekly

[Amadablam]

Paul Thurrott discussed this on Thursday on Windows Weekly:
http://twit.tv/show/windows-weekly/261 (jump to 21:20 and watch for about 5 minutes)
Paul thinks there was some pretty shoddy journalism with this story.

Just do a fresh install

[SirBitBucket]

First off, I build my own machines. So they are crap free. But all you gotta do is get a real windows install disc, not the one from the OEM which usually just reinstalls all the crapware, and reinstall windows from scratch. Sure you may need a few drivers, but Windows 7 usually handles that mainly automatically. It should take our windows key from the bottom of the machine... That and never runs 32 bit OS...

Order without crapware

[Animats]

The last time I ordered a desktop PC, it was from Central Computers, a computer chain with a clue. I ordered it without crapware, and the invoice actually said "no crapware". Very nice.

Central Computers, though, is a local SF bay area chain, based in Silicon Valley. They do mail order, but they assume you know what you want. The order menu starts with "select AMD or Intel", and the operating system menu has "No operating system" as an option, which reduces the price by $109.95,