E6400 clean install?

How well will the E6400 work without the dell DCP software installed. I've had the E6400 only two weeks and thinking of wiping the OS and installing Win 7 again with only the necessary drivers, without all the Dell software. The machine was using over 3.1 gigs of RAM yesterday and there was NOTHING running on the taskbar. Looked at the process list and there was no one process that was consuming my RAM, I was getting nickel and dimed by all the processes that are running. DCP seemed to be a big consumer as well as CPU time.

TIA

 

It'll work fine without DCP. You just don't get notifications when you adjust volume or screen brightness, and you won't get some power tweaks. Early versions of DCP were apparently super buggy and I'm sure a lot of people ran without it.

 

The basic DCP system manager doesn't consume an enormous amount of memory. Task Manager tells me it is currently using 14MB but the peak was 52MB.

John

 

Thanks. I have two other non-dell Win7 laptops at home that run great, both with 2 gigs of RAM, the E6400 has 4. This dell boots up to 1 gig consumed and drives up quickly after that. I've been through and disabled a bunch of services, but still have the same issue. I think I'll try the minimalist approach and try to start from scratch.

Thanks for you responses.

 

I'm only running the basic DCP System Manager. I don't have a fingerprint reader so I don't have the security suite installed. And I much prefer Windows to manager my wifi, so I don't have the Connection Manager installed.

But I do like having the notifications and such, so I keep the System Manager installed. Like John said, it has a very small footprint.

 

I bought a new hard drive and did a clean install of Win7. I did not install any of the Dell programs other than drivers and the computer runs really well. I had no issues at all, no yellow marks in device manager after I installed the drivers. I got all the drivers off the Dell site before I started and burned them to a CD and just loaded them all. Actually there weren't even that many yellow marks as windows 7 seems to accommodate a lot of hardware. There are a lot less programs running in the background now too.

 

After two blue screens and two failures due to out of memory errors (with nothing running) this weekend, I wiped the laptop clean and re-installed Win 7.

It's like a new laptop, much faster, more responsive and boots and shuts down in seconds and not minutes. I have installed none of the Dell drivers in fear that I'll get the crap ware again. I have installed the Acer Aspire Alps driver as suggested in another post, and that is working out great, it is much better than the Dell driver.

One question though, my device manager shows alerts on these two:
Broadcom USH
Dell Wireless 5620 (EV-DO-HSPA) Mobile Broadband Mini-Card

I see that the wireless driver is 78M. I want the driver, but not the management software. How do I install one without the other?

TIA