2 questions for a new laptop

[AlCapwn]

i just bought a new dell 9300 inspiron

i cant get the icons bottom right by the clock to go away. i go to taskbar -> properties -> customize and they are all on always hide, yet when i apply nothing happens. i cant get them to go away without exiting them. also i set my last used programs to appear on my start up menu, but that doesnt work either. how do i get these 2 things to work like i have them set to?

also i have 55 processes when i start my computer. there is no way i need that many and i cant figure out which ones i need and which ones i should remove in msconfig. i dont want to reformat because i already did a lot of things and dont have my XP cd. i just want the bare minimum to start up.

any help? thanks in advance

 

[Rip the Jacker]

reformat

 

[kitkat22]

The easiet way to go about fixing all that is to reformat, but it is possible to do this the long way. I have a Dell Inspiron 6000 and I can bet we have similar programs. The first step is to go to Add/Remove programs and find anything that has Dell attached to it and removing it except for Dell Driver Reset Tool and Dell Support. Following that remove Myway search bar, quickset and anything you don't recognize; keep things that are hardware related like Intel wireless or the modem stuff. You'll notice that the Myway searchbar doesn't go away after removing it. Go to Start=>Run and enter "regedit," click edit in the menu and find. Enter "myway" and run a search. Anything that it finds is ok to delete. This will take care of most of the bloatware and quite a bit of your 55 processes. The only things you need on startup are firewall, antispy stuff and AV. Anything else can go bye-bye. My favorite way to do this is to use the Advanced mode in Spybot Search and Destroy. Basically run Spybot and in the menu select advanced mode. You'll notice an additional set of icons in the lower left. Open the one that says tools and open the tool that says System Startup. Here you will be able to see all the processes on startup and there is a window on the right that helps explain what each thing is/does. Get rid of everything except Firewall, AV, antispy and the .dlls at the bottom of the list.

Again if you want the easy way out do a reformat, but make sure you have the drivers for your notebook (from dell's website)