How to preserve the new computer state?

I was wondering the same thing, but I think most people would recommend making the restore point AFTER you remove bloatware (is that what its called?).

Then again, you could always make 2....

You could take a 'snapshot' and capture the first-boot experience by imaging the entire HDD following the step by step guide linked in my sig below. By creating a backup prior to the first time booting, you could upgrade to a larger drive later and all hidden/diagnostics could be transferred and preserved to the new HDD. All you would have to do boot from the DVD and hit one key in order to restore this new HDD to a first-boot state or you could create a backup DVD with Dell's apps removed...whatever you prefer.

wow thanks somms!!!!

well, if you want to maintain your computer so it is always "healthy" and speedy, make sure you get a nice anti virus, anti spyware, registry cleaner, and to just not download anything and everything. Also you want to defrag your computer every once in a while.

Reformatting is just a pain in my opinion. You'll never have to reformat as long as you be intelligent about what you put on your computer.

i think that defragmenting is just not really useful. sometimes you get a working pc, sometimes you create a faulty bad sector in your hard disk... i don't know, it just scares me that you have to defrag sometimes. moreover it takes more than 12 hours for a 100gb notebook that is more than half filled, and the result is just not that satisfying...

and i think it's hard to install just the right stuffs in your computer. sometimes you hear of this google toolbar or msn messenger 8.0 stuff and you just wanna try. but who knows? you may not like it, and then you uninstall, and before you know it, a couple times of this, and your registry is being clogged up by remnants of these programs that you don't even know of. and plus sometimes you see something nice in the market, like a fingerprint reader or a new mouse and you try it out, and you don't like it and uninstall, your computer is never the same. somehow the installations of these new softwares even though they come from reputable companies, like Microsoft and Logitech, slows down your computer to a crawl... it's weird i mean logically, if you put something new in your house, your house gets cluttered but when you throw that thing away, your house should be in the same state as before right? so why doesn't it work with computers? i think microsoft should do something in that department... borrow some open source information from linux or something. it's just frustrating when you see something you like and installed it and realised it's not something useful, and you want to uninstall and then, your computer is affected irrevocably...

I wouldn't worry about creating bad sectors, any defragger that causes physical damage to your hard drive isn't a defragger, it's a virus. You should always run a disk check prior to defragging though, if a system file has corruption and then is defragged, it can make your system unbootable. I would agree that most people spend far more time defragging than they'll ever get back in saved time as a result.

Most of that is outside Microsoft's control. From my experience, most Microsoft software does uninstall fairly cleanly... you may find a registry key here or there or a folder it wasn't completely certain it was safe to remove, or even a shared DLL that doesn't really hurt anything, but usually nothing that actually compromises system performance. As for third party software vendors, they use a third-party install tool such as Wise or InstallShield and don't bother reading its documentation to learn anything about telling it about everything it has to remove in the event of an uninstall. Just check out the Non-Plug and Play section in Device Manager after an "uninstall" of Symantec Antivirus and you'll see what I mean. Microsoft can't force Symantec to learn how to properly script InstallShield.

From my experience, Linux install routines are so basic that uninstalling generally doesn't mean anything more than deleting a subfolder of /etc or /usr or something. If Microsoft started running install/uninstalls the way Linux does, they'd be going back 10+ years in time. No more entries on the Start menu, no more integration without a ton of your own work, etc. As crummy as uninstall routines are these days, spending the time to learn how to clean out your registry and Device Manager are a lot better than losing the convenience provided by properly scripted installations.

interesting somms!

Keep in mind that with the new Dell systems, the PC Restore feature is already there, so as long as you don't delete that partiton, you will be able to restore it to the factory shipped state. You don't have to create a restore point yourself, unless you reformatted and deleted that partition, or you reformatted and didn't want all the extra stuff Dell puts on the computer. The built in restore feature would put all that extra software right back on the computer.