Posted on 04/11/2006 3:55:36 PM PDT by Gomez
It’s a sad state of affairs when you buy a new computer these days and it comes pre-loaded with a ton of garbage software that brings your new machine to a crawl. If anyone’s bought a Dell PC in the last few years, you probably know what I’m talking about. Just recently, I was helping a friend set up his brand new Inspiron 1300 and it took FOREVER for it to boot up. It’s a very dissatifiying experience to pull a brand new computer out of the box and be spammed with a bunch of trial software. After removing all of the crap, (wich took a significant amount of time) it booted much faster and performed like it should. I kept thinking it would be nice to have an automated way to remove all this stuff. Thus was born the Dell De-Crapifier script.
Now, to be fair, I know most all of the major PC manufacturers have similar practices of installing trialware. I would suspect they don’t make any profit on the hardware (or even a loss) and they make their money on the kickbacks from the software companies. I don’t know.
Anyway, I wrote the Dell De-Crapifier using a great little scripting tool called AutoIT. You can use it to automate pretty much anything in Windows. There is also a cool editor called SciTE that gives you all the tools you need to put together a script. The best thing about this whole system is that you can generate stand alone executables that don’t require a runtime.
(Excerpt) Read more at yorkspace.com ...
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