P7811 fx

I am thinking about purchasing this lappy over the sager 5796, and I was wondering what junk is installed on it stock that I should get rid of when I get it, and how one would go about doing that?

Also, for anyone who bought it from Best Buy, does it come with the OS disc or not? I saw that it comes with microsoft works and media player and a few others but it does not mention the OS.

And are the speakers as bad as i've heard (sounds like headphones turned all the way up) or is it not very noticeable? or should i just wear headphones

 

It doesn't come with a ton of junk on it. It uses Bigfix for system updates from Gateway (pretty easy to uninstall), a trial for Microsoft Office, some "Gateway Games" thing that's easy enough to uninstall...and a few other small things. It's not too bad, actually.

It comes with a Gateway branded Vista Home Premium install cd for 32bit or 64bit Vista installs.

The speakers are not great. They are similar to most laptops that have just two speakers and no subwoofer. I had an eMachine M6805 and the laptops are very similiar to that. I also had an Everex XT5000T with a subwoofer and tried an HP DV7 series with a subwoofer for awhile. The bass response on those were substantially better. The speakers are not great, but they are not terrible.

 

i suggest uninstalling it through programs and features and then searching for it in my computer. u would just click on my computer and search. also, i would download ccleaner to remove obsolete registry entries from uninstaller references, etc. and other accumulated junk.

 

Honestly I always wear headphones on portable players of any type, and I do most of the time on this laptop too. The sound is not so great, but mostly, it is not all that loud. Things sound "louder" when they're more clear, too, sometimes. This sound is a bit dull and muddy. It gets better with a cheap set of headphones and gets much better with some really nice earphones/headphones.

Also, re installed programs, you get a trial of Microsoft Office that I find annoying and a waste of space. Uninstall from control panel takes care of it. Also Norton, which is a huge pain in the arse and extremely hard to uninstall in some versions. It came out fine through control panel on this laptop though.

 

In the flush of new ownership I took a few notes:
Backup Drivers:
Located at C:\ACER\DRV
copy the DRV folder to a safe location.
While there grab the Gateway user guides and save them.
Now I'm deleting the entire Acer folder to gain back 1.04GB
Now I run Disk Cleanup on C and check clean Hibernate blah blah thus recovering another bunch of space. I dislike Hibernate but don't take my word.
Want a nice graphic view of your drives? Get SpaceMonger V1.4.0 portable here: http://www.portablefreeware.com/?id=150

The system is fairly clean by crapware standards.
Uninstall:
Norton Live
Norton 360 (mother of all crapware)
Go to C:\\Program Files delete the Norton stuff.
Bigfix
Napster
Money
Office (need to pay for)
Office Registration Assistant
NetZero (folder and shortcut)

Also Uninstall if you don't need.
Power Point Viewer
Works
Cyberlink is history.

Startups:
ehTray.exe is for Media Center and I'm stopping it. (I don't use media center)
Adobe Reader Speed** I'll leave for now but I hate Adobe Reader and the whole shebang is terminal eventually.
Camera Assistant I'm leaving on for now to see if problems develop.
eRecoveryService is obviously Acer's recovery/restore. I'll leave for now.
SunJavaUpdate ... well this has become resistant to disabling, I'll slap it down later.

Turn off indexing on each partition through "properties."

 

Also, note that uninstall programs often leave a few files behind. They might be personal settings for the program, or whatever. Files and folders. Go to your programs and programs X86 folders to manually delete the orphans.

 

thanx for the responses! I'll be sure to get rid of some of that extra stuff when I get it

 

To me it is just easier to reinstall. I took five minutes and downloaded the drivers to a flash drive. Reinstalled, updated the drivers including the laptops2go GPU drivers and I was good to go in less than an hour. IMHO much easier than uninstalling a ton of programs, hunting down left over crap, repairing the registry, and always wondering if you got all the hidden files and settings. Just my $.02.