Freebie: De-Crapifier System Cleaner
Last January my neighbors, Dave and Jane, bought a Dell. I recommended it and promised to swing by to set it up. (I'm good at matching up the green cable with the green port, and the yellow with yellow. They're impressed, even if you're not.)
When I booted up their Dell, I was appalled at all the junk loaded onto the system. The desktop was snowed under with icons, mostly for lite editions of software they had no use for. And the system tray was under attack from of all sorts of stuff (McAfee's anti-virus comes to mind).
The reason, if you think about it, is that Dell and other PC manufacturers aren't profiting from hardware. Instead, they're making their margins by picking up a few bucks when buyers renew or upgrade the trial versions, or use a recommended ISP.
Fixing Dave and Jane's Dell
Three bottles of Anchor Steam and half the afternoon later, I was finished removing, reconfiguring, and smoothing over the rough edges.
Flash forward to early June. I read about the Dell De-Crapifier, a ingenious bit of scripting that promised to automatically zip through a new PC and remove things you don't need. Before the Dell De-Crapifier runs, you have the important option of telling it what you want to keep.
I'm guessing the author, Jason York, got some crap from Dell, so the product's been renamed to just The De-Crapifier. (I once tried using "butt" in a print column and the copy editor threw a hissy fit. So it's kind of enjoyable writing about the crap removed by the De-Crapifier.)
More on The De-Crapifier
Much to my dismay, Denny Arar, our Consumer Watch editor, scooped me on the De-Crapifier. (I was saving it for my Hassle-Free PC column.) She talks about it in detail in her September column. And you can tell she's a copy edit favorite: She was able to use "crap" not once, but twice.
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Gee Steve, Sorry to hear Denny beat the crap outta .. no, beat you to the cra... Um, I don't have a Dell PC, because I tried to order their catalog and wound up talking to a women in India who couldn't speak English. She probably never even heard the word crap before.
If Jason York would like to use this name, I hereby grant him full ownership of and rights to all trademarks, copyrights, and copylefts I may or could have:
Dellite Decrapifier. Dellite will get past the attornies.
I used to be too ladylike to use the word crap; however, I noticed that Dr. Laura Schlessinger (spelling), the ultra-conservative radio shrink, uses it. The word must have a technical connotation, which makes its use acceptable. Or maybe because the alternative, s***, conjures up a worse mental image. So maybe you could suggest to your copy cop that unless he/she's more conservative than Dr. Laura, it's OK. ;))