Acer Aspire 5742G - unwanted programs, folders & files.

Hi

I have just bought an Acer Aspire 5742G; it has 6GB RAM, a 640GB HDD and runs Windows 7.

The factory default recovery disks run to 4 DVDs. This seems to be largely because the basic (brand new) system includes vast amounts of unwanted programs and files; some of this is in a hidden folder named C:\OEM, particularly in C:\OEM\Preload\.

I plan to configure the laptop to satisfy my particular needs. Having done so, I want to make a recovery image in case of future disaster. Amongst the things I do not want to retain are McAfee Anti-Virus, Norton cloud storage, MS Office 2010, all the "Oberon" games, CyberLink PowerDVD8, NTI Video Maker, etc.

 

Recovery DVDs are always an image of a hidden recovery partition- not the current state of the laptop so you'll have to use whatever commercial software you want to make an image- but not Acer eRecovery.

 

Rereading my initial post, I realise that I didn't actually make clear what my gripe is/was.

What concerns me is knowing what I can safely get rid of and how and what I need to retain. This applies particularly to some of the better hidden stuff.

As an example why would I want to retain a 100 MB NTFS (Boot?) partition with 24.13 MB used, or a 15 GB PQSERVICE partition? I assume the latter is the hidden recovery partition. Are they useful to me or just there because they are there?


As it happens, I have made a set of recovery disks using Acer eRecovery. However, when eventually I manage to clean out all the unwanted software, I will use Acronis True Image to make recovery .TIB files.

 

Leave the PQRSERVICE- that is the recovery partition indeed and while it's a proper waste of space 98% of the time there's this one occasion where it will save you time and/or money, the other partition is not worth removing either.

The best course of action would be to remove the obvious crap (just leave Launch Manager- that's the most important part) and then do what you've planned- use Acronis and make an image.

Other than Launch Manager there's nothing you'd really need although Acer Arcade is hard to reinstall (it's not on the driver & app DVD so you'd have to recover the whole system)