WTFZOR? my reformat failed to delete dell's bloatware

OK i followed all the instructions from southergirls sticky and everything went smoothly. Untill i find my desktop with a ESPN sports stupid incon. So i investigate to find all the programs in my C: drive. Is my registry scrwewed and my reformat for nothing or are they deletable. It seems to me that the programs aren't installed as they don't run on startup or arent in the start menu so it's possible that i can jsut delete them and be on my way.

ok it's not as bad as i thought. It just had 2 bloatware applications the msn thing and something else but ig ot rid of them and it looks alright to me.

 

If you reformated your old registry is gone, the MSN thing, even though you aren't very specific about what this "thing" is, is built into Windows SP2 if we are both thinking of the same thing, thats shove it down your throat ware Microsoft gives you as a gift without your asking for it.

The "ESPN sports stupid icon" isn't a part of Windows, you had to of somehow installed this from a driver CD or something you used from Dell or it was packaged in with some third party software you installed after the installation like a game or something.

What was your question again? I'm not sure I understand what your question is?

It sounds like maybe your doubtful your reformat did anything. If you reformated it got rid of anything you were seeing as far as you could see it. If you still wanted to be sure everything was gone and you were truly starting up fresh you can search here for an old post I made by using the search engine. Search my user name and then look for "Zero Fill". That post I made was largely in reference to the "sticky" thread your mentioning here.

Here's a link to my post...

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=49471&highlight=Zero+Fill

if the link doesn't work for you you'll have to search.

 

Actually the ESPN thing is part of the Windows MCE package. It came with each of my fresh installs.

 

I agree with edge, it came with my fresh reinstall also. Just simply remove it from the computer with add/remove programs in control panel.

 

Never had any desire to use MCE myself, it's too XP Home for me, sounds several steps cooler than XP Home, but still, just not my thing, I run either XP Pro and/or OpenBSD on all my systems, XP Pro being my actual OS of choice just because its so not a headache to get installed and use on just about any hardware configuration you can throw at it. XP Home and MCE lacks in the level of security and controll I prefer.

I guess it's mainly an old school thing I have going back to the days of NT4.0 or Windows 95 as an option. Windows 95 and Home versions after that were just so unsecure it was pointless. Why have a password at all when all you had to do was click "cancel" at the log in prompt and you were into the system at an Administrator level anyhow?

I wonder what ESPN had to pay Microsoft to get that built into the OS?

 

XPMCE is actually built on Pro. There's another thread (I think under software) where this is discussed. Each time I reinstalled it told me that it was installing XP Professional, never mentioned MCE. The first time I reinstalled, I thought they sent the wrong disk until I got it loaded, and saw my MCE stuff there. In the other thread they said that the only thing missing from Pro is some of the networking that most home users didn't use anyway, the MediaCenter stuff is added.