Should We Remove Bloatware on Office PCs
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Our standard practice is to wipe/image any machine that comes in the doors with plans of being used somewhere. If it's new, that bloatware is outta there. I think more time has been wasted having this discussion than it takes to just do the smart, consistent thing, and make every machine standardized, without the crap that you either don't care about using or absolutely do not want on your machines.
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@Dashrender need to check before I call the names
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One thing that surprises me is that @Carnival-Boy is removing the bloatware manually in ten minutes. It easily takes me 30-60 minutes if I need to do that and I'm never confident that I got it all. There is often so much and so often requires a reboot after each package. How can I do it in ten minutes? Not that ten minutes isn't ten minutes too much, I find the imaging process to have zero additional overhead and effort but no bloatware to remove and no risk of removals breaking something or lingering crap that did not get removed or just got missed. So I will never have this problem again but.... I just don't see how it can be done so quickly, at least not on OEM images that I have seen. Especially when you need to remove the bloat partition too and reformat the drive!
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@Jason said:
Not really, It takes maybe 30min (complete, until it's ready for the user) for our guys to image a computer from WDS.
It takes me about 20 minutes to prepare a computer from unboxing it to giving it to the user. So that proves my point - imaging IS slower
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@art_of_shred said:
Our standard practice is to wipe/image any machine that comes in the doors with plans of being used somewhere. If it's new, that bloatware is outta there. I think more time has been wasted having this discussion than it takes to just do the smart, consistent thing, and make every machine standardized, without the crap that you either don't care about using or absolutely do not want on your machines.
That's so big... consistency. When you keep and/or remove bloatware you get inconsistent machines. Or even inconsistencies from one install to the next on the same machine. Since it takes easily demonstrably less effort even the first time for a single machine to avoid the vendor install disks (unless you don't do any install at all of the initial one as it comes which I would also never, ever do for other reasons) I just don't see why the bloatware would ever be handled at all. Drops below the home line, too.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@Jason said:
Not really, It takes maybe 30min (complete, until it's ready for the user) for our guys to image a computer from WDS.
It takes me about 20 minutes to prepare a computer from unboxing it to giving it to the user. So that proves my point - imaging IS slower
Only because you are willing to give your users something we would classify as "not ready for use." I'd call it "not prepped yet." You have to have a different standard for what you hand to them than we would accept. Mostly in terms of unknowns (you haven't had time to investigate what that machine is like) and inconsistencies (can you make sure everyone is getting the same thing.)
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@scottalanmiller said:
There is often so much and so often requires a reboot after each package.
I don't reboot after every package. I don't believe its necessary. I just reboot at the end and assume all the tidying up for all the uninstalled software will be done at that point.
I also don't remove the "bloat partition". What's the point?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
There is often so much and so often requires a reboot after each package.
I don't reboot after every package. I don't believe its necessary. I just reboot at the end and assume all the tidying up for all the uninstalled software will be done at that point.
On the ones that I have seen, it literally won't let you remove without rebooting. It's not an opinion, the OS does not allow it.
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@Carnival-Boy For the record, my wife’s laptop (and that’s my "main end user") has some game preinstalled and uninstalling it took me literary an hour – just because of the uninstallation progress. It just happens.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I also don't remove the "bloat partition". What's the point?
If you don't, you are just throwing away disk space as well as a small amount of performance. And since you would never want that partition to do anything, I see it as removing risk too.
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@angrydok said:
@Carnival-Boy For the record, my wife’s laptop (and that’s my "main end user") has some game preinstalled and uninstalling it took me literary an hour – just because of the uninstallation process. It just happens.
That's closer to my experiences. I could only get to ten minutes if I left most of it.
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Here is an article I did some time ago about letting vendors set up servers. I think the same thing applies here. For a good end user experience and very little overall effort, you can get consistency.
http://mangolassi.it/topic/5474/never-let-the-vendor-set-up-a-server
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It really depends. Even a lot of business machines come with very unnecessary pieces of software installed. I've seen HP Probooks and Elitebooks that are pretty good but still...yeah...
I'm a huge fan of imaging with generic images. A non-brand specific, OEM disc that you can use a key with. Assuming you have VL, this makes it easy. Then you have totally vanilla Windows and you can customize it to your heart's content.
If you're deploying many of the same machine, create an image this way and use that.
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@scottalanmiller said:
On the ones that I have seen, it literally won't let you remove without rebooting. It's not an opinion, the OS does not allow it.
What can I say? I assure you it takes me 10 minutes. Maybe European HPs are set up differently to US ones?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
On the ones that I have seen, it literally won't let you remove without rebooting. It's not an opinion, the OS does not allow it.
What can I say? I assure you it takes me 10 minutes. Maybe European HPs are set up differently to US ones?
That is VERY possible, in fact. Almost certain.
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Do European ones not get that "HP Smartsecure" suite or whatever that is called?
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Oh yes, managing OEM keys, we forget that in the calculation of time and effort. With modern machines making keys so hard to get, how do you handle being able to do OEM installs? It has been a decade since I needed to track OEM keys and match them to machines, but doesn't that alone cause even bigger headaches today than it did in the early 2000s?
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There is quite a bit of security stuff, yeah. Can't remember what it is called. And you have to uninstall it in a particular order.
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We used to have OEM Keys with all of the necessary info about what could be installed on each machine. Now, it seems, that is far harder.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
There is quite a bit of security stuff, yeah. Can't remember what it is called. And you have to uninstall it in a particular order.
Yeah, I knew that it was order specific. But it always makes me reboot. The "Programs" dialogue will refuse to work and force a reboot to continue.
