News By Tom Brownsword

Two posts ago I talked about all of the nag screens and balloon tips that bothered me when I started Windows Vista. I’m happy to say that I was able to get rid of a lot of them.

While I still have a ways to go to get rid of some other stuff I don’t like, at least it’s a step in the right direction — and I’d like to share that “direction” with you. It’s a free product called “PCDecrapifier” and you can get it by clicking here.

After I clicked on the program to run it, it asked me a few questions. I’ll briefly explain how I answered.

First, read the license agreement, especially the part about the creator not being liable for any problems that may arise. You do use this at your own risk. Not at my risk, not at the creator’s risk, etc.

It will ask if this is a new “out of the box” computer. If you say “no”, it will ask if you want to create a Restore Point. BY ALL MEANS, SAY “YES”! This will make it easier to back out of any changes you may make. I’m not sure if it simply deletes the links to the annoying startup programs or if it actually deletes them, so even the Restore Point won’t help if it actually deletes the software and you later decide that you want it.

Be careful; if you have any paid programs, make sure that they are NOT checked on the “Select the Items to Uninstall” screen. I installed the full version of Microsoft Office 2007 Standard and it asked me if I wanted to remove it (since a 60 day trial comes with some computers).

On the “WARNING” screen, note that if your computer reboots before the software finishes running, you’ll have to run the program again after reboot to complete the process. The reason? Some programs may require a reboot before completely uninstalling.

The results?

* It didn’t remove the “Norton Internet Security” popup spam.

* It didn’t remove the “check your computer security” balloon “nag”.

But that was all that it didn’t do. It’s MUCH better now.

And a lot of those “junk” programs are gone.

I’ll be traveling over the next week (see my previous post), but if something went wrong that I didn’t notice, I will come back and update this post. I recommend that, if you are the cautious type, that you want a week or two before running this program so that I can deliver “the rest of the story”, as Paul Harvey would say. I’ll update this post to let you know.

Thanks for listening,
Tom

P.S. — Since I’ll be traveling with my Vista laptop computer this week, I decided to get lazy and just use the pre-installed trial version of Norton Internet Security for 60 days. So I activated it, went to do a Live Update… and it failed. My computer can’t find “LUALL.DLL” — the Live Updated DLL (and their solution is to uninstall and re-install; how the heck do I do that with a pre-installed program?). So not only does Microsoft give you popup spam, they give you popup spam for software that doesn’t work…

I’ll install a couple of products to help with that. Those posts will be over on my Business Protector blog; I’ll put a link here once they are up.