Acer sotware - junk/spyware? help to remove them

Acer does indeed install a whole lot of software which takes up
many processes and memory on my computer.

I would like your opinion on which software should I remove and which
should I keep. like the empowering software, etc...
My model is an Acer Aspire 5562WXMi


Thanks.

 

"Spyware" is not a term that should be bandied about lightly. Do you have any evidence to back it up, or are you just using the word without knowing what it means?

 

Hence his question mark not exclamation mark.

There's Windows "Add/Remove Programs" and then running "Ad-Aware" and "Spybot - Search and Destroy" Thats all I can offer.

 

You could try hijackthis from www.hijackthis.de
pasting the results back in the box on their website gives you a commentory on anything running on your system.

The only "monitoring" program that may be running is probably from Realtek. If you install the drivers from Realtek's site (NOT Acer's) it also installs a monitor that sends back info to realtek. Hijackthis should tell you if this is the case.

In my opinion you won't gain that much from removing factory installed software.

hth

Drio

 

I'm sorry if I offended anyone but I didn't mean to treat Acer's bundled software as spyware or anything bad - just to point out that some if it is probably useless

I've opened up my msconfig and reviewed about 20 (!!!) entries of acer'
software whether it's realtek, orbicam and many many more just taking up my
ram for no reason. I've removed some of it and gained another 100mb (no less!) of ram after the initial boot of windows xp.


That was my point.

 

I guess it really depends, most people probably won't miss that extra 100MB of Ram, however if you have some specific need (and/or some of the installed programs are not useful for you) then you can uninstall them.

 

Gaining the extra RAM is actually a bit of a red herring.. Windows tries to allocate 50% of your available RAM to itself, regardless of how much you've got (i.e. Windows will allocate itself 128MB in a 256MB system, or 2GB in a 4GB system). If/when your system starts becoming low on RAM, Windows will dynamic deallocate the RAM it's holding onto that will have the least performance impact (i.e. things like the start menu icon cache).

At the end of the day, you can't control the way RAM gets allocated, but less processes will generally result in less processor/disk usage so that's an upside.

 

Thanks Travel Matey, I didn't know this 50% thing.

I don't know what Windows actually considers "itself", but could this mean that for example the Windows Wireless is considered by Windows as part of "itself", whereas the 4 processes introduces by the full fledged Intel Wireless PRO are onsidered "other". The implication could be to use Windows stuff wherever possible unless the other stuff really ADDs value (in terms of functionality/speed/etc.)

But then again, if it start re-allocating when the "other" half is used it won't matter, would it.

Regarding the number of processes:
I have 61 right now, and it doesn't bother me since they are all doing something I need while doing my stuff. So it's not the number but what theyare doing that matters (after all a processes can easily be split or combined and one memory hog may have less functionality than 5 little critters)

just my 2c, and thanks for the 50% tip

Drio

 

I took off Acer epowermanagement, net management, and performance management and I have noticed an increase in startup time and more reliability without any lost functions.