Originally posted by: HN
Originally posted by: mchammer
Originally posted by: HN
Originally posted by: MoPHo
Originally posted by: mchammer
Originally posted by: HN
Originally posted by: mchammer
Why bother with reformatting it if its new? Then you need to go find the chipset drivers, graphics drivers, etc.
because depending on which division you ordered it from, it may be loaded with a bunch of crap. and what do YOU do with real crap? you wipe it clean!
What kind of crap do they put on it? Do you really need the disk space that bad?
not so much disk space as it is "FREE 8 YEARS OF AOL!!!" and useless crap you dont need.
Yup, not necessarily the disc space at all. it's cleaning out all the things that dell has set up to startup on their own (and not necessarily right away; some program pop-ups/notices won't appear until a few days later). dell reminders, "try this program!" pop-ups, several neutered demos with ads to buy, and i can't say for sure about others but i detected 1 known spyware (yeah, i ran an av and spyware scan just after i started up out of curiosity). wipe it clean and you're in control with efficiency of a fresh install and no nags.
<------Dell 8400
How about MSCONFIG? You could disable the stuff from starting. Your notebook may have custom functionality that would be a pain to track down drivers for.
If it were that easy, spyware/adware would never be a problem. I'm not saying what dell puts on is as insidious as that, but you're just more sure that it's absolutely, positively clean.
For dell drivers, they're all consolidated onto one place, you just have to put in the service tag number (or even just the model number) and it'll take you to a page of drivers/software specific to that model.
Where would you get a clean copy of the OS from? Surely the restore partition disk/would have the same stuff?
What about power mangement drivers etc. they have those too? Just seems like a pita to me vs. deleting whats on there.