Bought new laptop... how to get rid of all junk ware?

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Pinipig523

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 1, 2004
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Hey fellas...

I just bought a new laptop by Sony. There's a lot of junk ware on it and was wondering how to effectively get rid of it without having the Geek Squad at BB charge me an arm and a leg (149$) for it.

I went into the program add/delete section of the control panel and I deleted as much as I could but there are still some remaining (i.e. travelocity search bar, ebay/sonystyle pop up each time I load Internet Explorer, etc...)....

Is there a way to do this? Is there a program I can download from the net to help me pinpoint these junk wares and delete them?

Please help.. thanks!
 
If you can manage it, I'd grab all your drivers for your hardware off of the Sony Support site. Then see if you can do a clean install, that will give you a nice clean slate to work off of. Most of the time, that's the first thing I do when I or any of my family members purchases a new notebook.
 
I'm not sure what the policy is, but you can obtain a cd from your friends and use your key. Make sure it's OEM though. I'm also pretty sure you can download a copy for the M$ website for the trial ver.
 
hey Pinipig try downloading firefox for starters. see if you still get those annoying popups from sonystyle. then if they don't come up keep using firefox and don't look back. should solve your IE toolbar mess in the sense that if it's out of sight out of mind.

if it still bothers you that they are there goto the toolbar editor in IE and uncheck them so they don't even show... though you should be finding something for them in add remove programs... you can find teh tool bar management by going to tools>manage add-ons.
 
CCleaner http://www.ccleaner.com/ - it's FREE and it can be a big help. Has an uninstaller (I think it works better than the control panel IMHO) and startup menu helper, a modest registry cleaner and a general windows/applications cleaner. Also get HijackThis. It shows every program on your computer - another free and useful tool.
 
TheSandman2236 said:
I'm not sure what the policy is, but you can obtain a cd from your friends and use your key. Make sure it's OEM though. I'm also pretty sure you can download a copy for the M$ website for the trial ver.
Click to expand...

Where can I find my key?

And are you sure this works?
 
Pinipig523 said:
Where can I find my key?

And are you sure this works?
Click to expand...

Hi Pin

Your key should be on a sticker on the back of your computer - it's usually kind of hidden on the back near the bottom. It's the microsoft sticker with the next to impossible to read numbers and letters. I have to use a magnifying glass and a flashlight to even begin to be able to read it - then I write it down and stick it with the other info that came with my computer.

If you can lay hands on an OEM version of your o/s, make sure you get all your drivers and the software you want and put all that on CD, thumbdrive, whatever - you should be able to do a clean install.
 
With a brand name laptop, I've had luck with leaving the original install and manually uninstalling all unneeded software. Once the machine is fairly clean and has all the basics in place, you can ghost it in case you ever need to reinstall it clean.
 
Pardon my stupidity, but what is ghosting? And how?

Also, I'm trying to create a system restore disc because Sony didn't include one, how do I go about doing so?
 
ghosting is basically creating a recovery disk. it makes image or copy of your current hard drive so if shit hits the fan you can restore from that image. being as I don't do ghosting others might be able to give you better advice on what software would be best.
 
I've got a program called "Acronis True Image Home" that I use for backing up my drives, which you could use to do a ghost. Basically, you install the program, then you use it to burn a bootable recovery disk, and then you'd go through and select what drives you want to back up and such, and it will go ahead and make an image of the whole drive. Then if you ever want to install that image, you boot the computer using the recovery disk, you pick the recover option, choose the backup source (external hdd, or dvds, etc.) and it will copy the image to your hdd, bringing you back to that point. The program of course costs money though. I like it though because you can schedule backups, which I use to back up everything to an external hdd once a week in case anything were to ever happen I wouldn't lose any of my stuff. There's also a program made by Norton I believe, called "Norton Ghost" or something like that, which may be better for solely making a ghost disc. I've never used it, so I can't tell you how well that program works.
 
Ghosting is nice but only if you like to reload every month or so. I'd go with CCleaner like Ditzilla said. Very effective.
 
I would search isohunt and look for the Geeksquad Customizer disc. There are a lot of things on there that make removing absolutely all of the crap realyl easy work. If you cannot find it, I would reccomend "borrowing" a disc from a friend and doing a clean reinstall on the machine.
-Massacre
 
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