Clean installs

Morning all,

Hopefully tomorrow or Monday I shall take delivery of my nice shiney new Acer Aspire 8940G, but I have a software question for you.

It comes pre-installed with Windows 7 Home Premium, and apparently a while host of Acer bundled crapware.
What's my best plan of attack?
Delete the crapware from the laptop via Control Panel, or do a clean install like I've read countless times on these boards?

If I'm to do a clean install how do I go about it? I've re-built a laptop from the Motherboard after a faliure, and another one after a Virus killed XP, but I've never formatted a main harddrive and stared again from fresh.

Any hints or tops if this is the best course of action?

And could I be really brave (or idiotic) and simply take the 500GB 5400rpm main drive out and replace with a faster 7200rpm drive before doing the clean install onto that?

 

I have a similar question, either.

My aim is to reinstall Windows 7 to have a clean installation without stuff from Acer. In addition to that I would like to set up a Debian (and maybe a Gentoo ) system on it.

So, had anyone tried this configuration on the current Aspire 8940G ?

 

Bump for advice

 

This is a tricky one. You don't want to uninstall anything that would kill your functionality. I'd go ahead and make a list of everything under control panel. Post it here and we can narrow down which ones are safe to uninstall. Other can simply be Googled for their description.

A clean install is scorched earth and IMO takes too much time. Unless you got time to kill.

You should start your own thread. Hijacking is impolite.

 

I have a friend in IT and his suggestion was simply take the 5400rpm drive out of the 8940 and place in a brand new 7200rpm 500GB hard drive and try a clean install on that. If it all goes wrong then I still have the full operating system on the original drive to fall back to

 

That is also an option. Yeah, more attractive than clean installing, but I just don't see the reason to buy another harddrive that you can't carry around.

 

The 8940 has 2 drive bays so my thought is to up the storage from 500GB to 1TB so I can keep my videos and pictures with me rather than keepng them on an external drive as I do now.

 

Not too bad of an idea

 

I'd play with it first, see how happy you are with its performance.

I am typing this post on a brand-new Acer 1410 with a Dual-core celeron and it is blazing fast just the way it came from the factory. I'm totally happy with it, and I'm of the mindset that if your computer is giving you too many issues, you should just format & do a clean install.

I can't disagree more with the poster above about the ease/difficulty of doing a clean install: A clean install simply means that you delete the hard drive partition containing your operating system (which happens instantly, as soon as you type the command) and then proceed to install the OS on a now "clean" hard drive.

There's no way you could do anything to negatively impact your system's performance or functionality by simply uninstalling stuff, as long as you have an idea of what you are doing. If you just go into control panel and remove games, mcaffee, and any other programs that you don't want or need, you are fine.

Win7 is really, really painless to install as virtually all drivers & devices work out of the box. If you install from a USB stick and NOT a DVD, it only takes 30 min and you are up and running again.

So anyway, I'd leave your system alone, play with it, see how well it performs and re-evaluate from there.

You know, if it isn't broken, don't fix it.

 

Also, replacing the hard drive is not wise, IMO.

Any performance difference between a 5400 and 7200 RPM drive would be totally negligible at best.

If you were looking at a SSD, that's a different ballgame....those are supposed to be much, much faster than traditional drives.

 

If you did a clean install of windows 7, all of the important stuff needed to run the system i.e. drivers, launch manager software etc, can be found on Acers website. Everything else is junk. You shouldn't have any issues or performance problems doing a clean install and downloading the drivers, done this loads myself.

Another way round it is to uninstall all of the stuff you don't want. I would use a free program called Revo uninstaller, it's a great program, and gets rid of junk that can be left over when getting rid of software. Also use ccleaner, as this can get rid of stuff left over aswell. I would go this route first before doing a clean install, then if your still not satisfied, then go the clean install route.

 

Be careful. You will need acer arcade deluxe to play your Blue Rays (if it comes with blue ray).