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Dell cleans up crapware
By Austin Modine in Mountain View
Published Monday 25th June 2007 21:11 GMT

Dell's tradition of shoveling bloatware into newborn PCs may be coming to a close. All it took was a few years of outrage.

Previously, only Dell XPS systems had the privilege of shipping with a "no software preinstalled" option. But vigilant e-coniptions on Dell's IdeaStorm (http://www.ideastorm.com/) feedback site has prompted Dimension desktops and Inspiron notebooks to join the party.

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There's also the fact that Dell has been hemorrhaging, because it decided to save a few bucks by hiring incompetent Indian tech support, and users, particularly business users, have been fleeing to HP.

Their tech support could be either incompetent or Indian, and they would probably have been OK, but together, not so good.

Customers who configure either system on Dell.com can now choose to forgo unhappy hours of removing unwanted "productivity," ISP, media software such as QuickBooks Trial, NetZero Installers, Earthlink Setup, Wanadoo Europe Installer, Norton Ghost 10.0, MS Plus Photo Story 2LE, MS Plus Digital Media Installer, AOL US, AOL UK, MusicMatch Music Services, Corel Snapfire Plus SE, Yahoo! Music Jukebox, Roxio RecordNow, Sonic RecordNow Audio, Dell Search Assistant — and the rest of the gang.

But not all software gets cut by Occam's pre-configuration razor. Dimension and Inspiron systems will still ship with trial version of anti-virus software, Acrobat Reader and Google tools.

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