Proprietary software removal

[hitchface]

Heya Mechers,

I wanna throw a question out there to all of you who know store-bought machines fairly well. Hypothetically, if I were to buy an HP, Dell, Gateway, Toshiba, or any other off-the-shelf machine and remove the proprietary software, what kind of a performance boost might I get?

[glc]

You will notice it. Here's a neat app to help you do this:

http://www.yorkspace.com/pc-de-crapifier/

[ktkendall]

Every PC that I have ever worked on like Dell, Gateway, Compaq etc., that's the first thing I do is run the msconfig utility, and I go the the startup tab and uncheck all the crap you don't need running in the backround hogging up resources. The performance boost is huge. I say there is a conspiracy among those PC makers and software companies also cause you buy their software and it has to put itself in the startup folder even though you really don't want or need it there, this way unsuspecting PC owners think they need a new PC much quicker than they really do if they would just do a little maintenence. I've had recent occasion to install DSL and network a couple of brand new Gateway PC's right out of the box, and I absolutely could not believe all the crap that was checked to run at startup on these brand new PCs. They ran like crap right out of the box, but now run pretty nicely since I unchecked all the unnecessary startup items. A lot of that software you don't necessarily have to remove but certainly uncheck it from running at startup. Thats what bogs down the PC.

[hitchface]

Yeah, I knew the boost would be substantial. I was shooting for a percentage (obviously a rough one), so if anyone has a vague number in their head, throw it out.

EDIT: glc, thanks a ton for that tool. Looks like it will come in handy! Do they do updates to it as far as a "removable software library" goes?