Well, I just bought (purchased 08/05/2005) an Inspiron 6000. I wasn't sure about buying it over another brand, not being entirely happy with some previous Dell laptops, but the price deals were too good to resist. 
(And it does seem to be quite a nice machine.)
Since I didn't want to go through the hassle of reformatting (especially with no included CDs for the OS), the first thing I did was to remove the usual Dell bloatware using Window's add/remove programs. The programs included a little utility cally "My Way Search" that provides "a web portal and search engine like Yahoo!, but without any banners, pop-ups or spam. No ads means more room for our terrific personalized features like weather, news, sports, finance, entertainment and more" i.e. Dell installed spyware, albeit pretty benign spyware.
I removed My Way Search, and restarted, but the program was still on the add/remove programs list, with no add/remove option listed. It was deactivated, but not cleanly uninstalled, so not only is Dell installing spyware or "selected" new dimensions and inspirons, they're not allowing you to simply remove it.
I contacted My Way Search, and their unistallation program did nothing. I tried Spybot, RegScrub and other stuff to no effect. Finally, from posts on the Dell support forums, I ran
MsiExec.exe /X{78d944d7-a97b-4004-ab0a-b5ad06839940}
from the start bar (doh! why didn't I think of that right away?) and it successfully removed the "My Way Search" entry from the add/remove programs list (and hopefully the registry and everywhere else, but who knows?)
What on earth does Dell think they're doing?
(And it does seem to be quite a nice machine.)Since I didn't want to go through the hassle of reformatting (especially with no included CDs for the OS), the first thing I did was to remove the usual Dell bloatware using Window's add/remove programs. The programs included a little utility cally "My Way Search" that provides "a web portal and search engine like Yahoo!, but without any banners, pop-ups or spam. No ads means more room for our terrific personalized features like weather, news, sports, finance, entertainment and more" i.e. Dell installed spyware, albeit pretty benign spyware.
I removed My Way Search, and restarted, but the program was still on the add/remove programs list, with no add/remove option listed. It was deactivated, but not cleanly uninstalled, so not only is Dell installing spyware or "selected" new dimensions and inspirons, they're not allowing you to simply remove it.
I contacted My Way Search, and their unistallation program did nothing. I tried Spybot, RegScrub and other stuff to no effect. Finally, from posts on the Dell support forums, I ran
MsiExec.exe /X{78d944d7-a97b-4004-ab0a-b5ad06839940}
from the start bar (doh! why didn't I think of that right away?) and it successfully removed the "My Way Search" entry from the add/remove programs list (and hopefully the registry and everywhere else, but who knows?)
What on earth does Dell think they're doing?
