Slashdot Mirror
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."
For all the crap Sony does, they get some things right. When I bought a Sony laptop for a client, I had to make system restore DVDs (it had a SSD and the restore partition was eating up too much space). During the process, I noticed a "minimal" restore option in addition to the complete restore. I did some reading and found that it's just the OS and necessary drivers. None of the crapware that normally comes preinstalled.
So I wiped the drive, did the minimal restore, and it was exactly as advertised. Clean system, all drivers preinstalled, no crapware. Hats off to the Sony engineer or manager who insisted on that feature.
I got the driver package labeled "IT professionals only", that didn't include the crapware and was 1/10th the size to download.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
True story that many have seen.
I saw a world-expert who was invited to a plenary lecture at an international conference giving his talk (which was meant to be the highlight of the conference) - when he was rudely interrupted by a pop-up which caused the fullscreen presentation to lose focus. The pop-up was indicating that it was about to shut down to complete the updates, and had a timer from 15s. An embarrassed projectionist quickly clicked on the 'delay' 15min button in a panic. He would have had to have selected another option from the dropdown menu to have chosen a longer time. But of course 15min later, the same thing happened again. This time the projectionist was prepared and quickly selected an option to bother it an hour later.
What a f***ing joke piece of s*** software!
At this rate, people will soon go buy MacBook Airs at Apple stores because they're cheaper than their Windows counterparts.
There are plenty of Microsoft Certified Professionals out there that work in a computer store
Those certifications are skills accreditations based on passing a test. Just because the professionals doing the work carry a personal Microsoft certification, does not mean that Microsoft certifies or stands behind their work product or controls the results in any way whatsoever.
Just because the work is done by a MCP does not mean the actual work is certified by MS; the MCP is not employed by Microsoft, so Microsoft does not certify all their work, they only accredit their ability to pass certain tests.
Now presumably, they are certifying the work done by their stores in some way, like most businesses do.
There are plenty of professionals who have paper Microsoft creds that are not really qualified, and could not get (or keep) a job at a M$ store doing the work.
Works for me. I keep Windows contained in a VM, but don't use it much.
It's really MORE convenient to run Windows in a VM. No malware problems and Snapshots anytime you want them.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
1/10th?
My jaw dropped when I saw Dell pushing a 700+ MB printer driver. You have to look for it but you can find a 6MB driver only install instead.
How on earth you need 700MB for a printer driver and software is beyond me..
One fun thing with HP driver I experienced is this:
I have a HP Professional Series Color 2500CM printer (quite old, but can print on A3 pages and the cartridges are very easy to refill, making the printing very cheap). The printer is old enough that Windows XP has a built-in driver for it, and it works quite well. Once I decided to download a driver from HP and try that out. It showed error messages saying that the ink cartridges and print heads have expired. As it turns out, HP has burned expiry dates to the printheads and cartridges, but the Windows XP driver does not check, which allows me to use the parts until they wear out (the yellow ink cartridge was supposed to expire in 2002 and I'm still using it).