So my shiny new laptop arrived yesterday and I booted it up to check it was all working as expected. It was, but I was disgusted by all the crap installed on it by default. Take a look at these two screen shots, one from Process Explorer and the other from Autoruns:

In the ProcExp screenie the bottom four or five are processes I ran, but other than, that’s what is running after logon. I’m not really surprised since that’s what Dell do, but this is the first consumer Dell I’ve bought (the rest have all been work machines) and it seems to have a lot more chaff installed than I’m used to seeing. This week a colleague at work, also got a new laptop, a Sony Vaio, and that too came pre-installed with tons of useless crude.

Stuff like this annoys the crap out of me since you have to waste time removing it and tidying up, however in the case I just scrubbed the OS and started again with Vista (or at least that was the idea…).