Dell De-Crapifier…

[hech54]

My aunt had a 70's Chevy Malibu...the smaller one but it still had a V8 in it. It died a horrible death after several years of pretty faithful service to her.
Gas prices were pretty high then so she decided to get a smaller car....she bought one of the first Ford Escorts that had recently been released.....of course it was a 4 cylinder.
She then began spouting nonsense that she will never buy a Ford car again....we asked her why of course....and her reply was that "My Ford has absolutely no power at all....all Fords are slow and I'll never buy another one again"

To at least give her some credit....she at least in fact owned a Ford and she wasn't referring to friend, neighbor, second cousin or some guy on a website telling her that ALL Fords are slow...or that ALL Dell computers come loaded with crapware.

[SingSing]

----Dell M140 at $679, free shipping, no tax -----
Intel Pentium M Processor 740 (1.73GHz/2MB Cache/533MHz FSB)
14.1 inch WXGA LCD Panel , 1280 x 800
512MB Shared DDR2 SDRAM 2 Dimms
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900
60GB 7200rpm Hard Drive
8xCD/DVD burner(DVD+/-RW)w/dble-layer DVD+R write capability
Intel PRO 2200 Internal Wireless (802.11 b/g, 54Mbps)
5.47 lbs, 6-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery (53 WHr) ...

Just drop to $548.00, so there will be more people out there dealing with Dell Crapware.
Note : The catch : This laptop does not have PCMCIA slot, but an express card slot. But really who care ?

[Nelson37]

Well, I setup probably avg of 2 or 3 Dells every week, IMO they ARE in fact loaded with a lot of unnecessary software, right out of the factory box. What really pisses me off is that they are advertised as "including" AV software, when what they have is a 90-day version, usually McAfee. Sorry, McAfee is a program with a one-year subscription. What the customer gets is something different.

A fair amount of cleanup is needed, disks are no longer included, the files on a HD partition is a terrible idea, an HD crash and you got nothing. Again, when a customer purchases XP, or whatever, that product comes with a disk. No disk, no product.

Furthermore, Dell's build quality has slipped to the point where I no longer wholeheartedly recommend them, and have gotten back into building PC's for customers. The problem with that is that there is no real profit in it, if you try to stay reasonably close to mail-order pricing.
If you price it high enough to make any money, when compared to mail-order prices it seems to be excessively high. And when the customer can't find the Enter key, they consider that a Warranty (free) problem, and I am warranty support. With Dell, or other mail-order brand, they often pay me to do the warranty support rather than wait for Dell, who sends out idiots that they pay $35.00 per hour. They get what they pay for.

This problem is certainly not unique to Dell, most major PC makers do similar packaging and are having similar quality-control problems. Its a commodity item. Dell is just the most common.

As far as the software being loaded on startup, even when this is removed there are often DLL files which ARE loaded, using memory, or which can conflict with other software, and the software can be activated by certain actions, or it takes over some functions, like picture viewing. This crap simply should not be there. Load the OS and whatever the customer specifically orders, if you want to include disks for other software, great, but if the customer did not ask for it, it should not be installed on the PC.

[SingSing]

Dell is not sticking us with Junkware anymore ? How real is this ?

See :

[Seeker47]

Most major manufacturers put a lot of 'stuff' in there as they are paid by software companies to do it.

No time to go through this thread right now, but I recently read a post on another forum claiming that it is possible to order systems from Dell without this stuff -- just the bare OS. If you are about to place an order with them anyway, it might be worth checking out.

[MOVIEGEEK]

Dell is not sticking us with Junkware anymore ? How real is this ?

See :

Have you seen the prices for a custom built PC?
I would rather pay a lower price and delete all the crapware.