Dell Ships Gaming Systems Sans Bloat

An anonymous reader writes "Dell has followed up and put their money where their mouth is after HardOCP panned them last year for selling 'gaming systems' that you could not even install some popular 3D games on due to the bloatware on the system. You can now get clean installs on some XPS Dell systems. Dell is running a 'You Spoke, We Listened,' header on their site." From the article: "It seems that Dell has taken our criticism (and our readers as well) to heart and has made the much sought after move to offer select XPS systems with "limited" pre-installed software. We phoned a Dell sales representative late Monday, and he confirmed that the installation is completely clean, except for the included anti-virus program. As explained to us by Dell, There is no AOL installation, no "media jukebox", and no ISP offers to weigh the supplied operating system down."

How much more?

[gEvil (beta)]

And how much more do the systems cost to get Dell to not include that crapware?

Still I ask

[voice_of_all_reason]

Can I buy a system without paying the $100 XP tax, considering I already own a legitimate copy of windows?

I gotta say.

[rwven]

My number one grip with buying a prebuilt system versus building my own (cost aside) is that they come with so much crap on them. When i bought my gateway laptop, it took in between 3 and 5 minutes to boot up when it was new. After i cleaned all the misc crap off of it that i'll never use, it took about 45 seconds or less. I vote that pc manufacturers give you the very basic installation and then give you a DVD that has everything else on it. You stick it in and it gives you a nice menued list of things you may want to install.

A person who just spent 1500 bucks on a new laptop isn't going to be wowed when their new laptop is taking longer to boot than their old one...

Re:Still I ask

[crerwin]

Where I work we purchase about 500 Dells every year, and the first thing we do is image them with our software. These computers all come with XP pre-installed. We could get them without XP, but there would be no price difference (we did ask). It's easier for Dell to just push them all through with XP than to worry about what gets what.

On a slightly related note, the USPS pays EXTRA to get vehicles without air conditioning and radios. I guess this improves gas mileage.

Parent is not flamebait - windows subsidy is real

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not paying the Windows tax - the spyware & adware & crippleware companies that Dell bundles are subsidizing the Dell to a far greater extent than Microsoft taxes it. I should know - I worked for a crippleware vendor who kicked back 20 - 50% of our upgrade revenue (depedning on the OEM) to the OEMs who let us install our crap.

With these gamer systems, Dell's margin's are high enough tha they don't need this subsidy; but for the most part, noone in their right mind (even Dell) would be paying Redmond taxes if someone else weren't paying them to do so.

That's the real reason Windows can never get serious about combatting spyware -- OEM support for windows depends entirely on the ability to hide deceptive spyware on the systems.

Re:How much more?

[gEvil (beta)]

Actually, looking at Dell's page they indicate that it's for "select XPS systems." Without going through and custom-configuring a few machines, I'm going to guess that they only offer this option on their higher end (and hence higher revenue) models.

Bring it on, just keep it cheap!

[skryche]

Isn't all that pre-installed crap the reason that computers are as cheap as they are? I say they should go ahead and shovel it on; I'm going to do a fresh install anyway.

Re:Not that big of a deal.

[LehiNephi]

Considering that the Symantec (specifically Norton) products preinstalled on my E1705 were the worst behaving (and most difficult to remove - in fact I couldn't completely and cleanly remove them) components of Dell's preinstall, the fact that they are leaving an antivirus in their preinstall doesn't really help much. Antivirus programs are notorious for causing performance problems.

This is no joke. I just ran into a perfect example of this last weekend on my parents' computer. Here's the story:

1) Father buys 2-year subscription to Norton Internet Security and installs it.
2) At some point, LiveUpdate stops updating, saying "try again later....or just reinstall LiveUpdate"
3) A short chat with Symantec tech support reveals that it will require a full uninstall and reinstall of NIS
4) Opening the "add/remove programs" window reveals that NIS is occupying over 1GB on the hard drive
5) The uninstall encounters a fatal error and won't complete.

So now this computer has an install of NIS that won't update, and won't uninstall.

Crapware at its best.

true enough

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently purchased a pretty decent Dell XPS. It didn't have much on it. I needed to unintall a couple of things that I didn't like, but it was otherwise clean; soundcard software, dvd software, the usual MS crap you find on an xp machine (outlook, messenger...), but nothing much else. I was surprised.