Thomas Nicholson

This weekend I had to restore my home office desktop to the factory original image since I lost my most recent recovery disks. I forgot how much crap software they load on new machines. I was already depressed that I couldn’t find my XP Professional media. Going back to XP Home was hard enough. But having to see all that pre-loaded crap… Knowing that even when I uninstalled it my system would still tainted by all that crap made me sick. I’m the kind of person that gets a new computer home, wipes it, tests all the hardware then loads the best version of the current OS. I had never even used the XP Home install.

Once I finished recovery and booted the system I started going down the list of programs in Add/Remove Programs one-by-one and uninstalling them. I did two or three and decided there has to be a better way. I remember hearing about Sony charging customers $50 to remove software loaded by Sony.   I figure if they are going out of the way to load crap on it in the first place why they would make it easy to remove. I then checked out LifeHacker.com and did a search. I found just the program I needed.

It’s called PC Decrapifier and it’s a free program that basically does a bulk uninstall of third-party programs on your “new” or “resorted” system. I gave it a try and it removed about 80% of the programs I wanted gone. I don’t know if the fact that it didn’t get more of the crap software was because the image I loaded was over 4 years old or not. I can say that it is a great tool and uninstalling some programs is better then none. If you have a factory built system and you’re running the original OS install, give PC Decrapifier a try at removing those unwanted programs quick and easy.

I did have a few programs it didn’t find/remove and the program doesn’t have any intelligence about dependencies. If you try to uninstall program “B” before you uninstall program “A” it will fail and skip that program. But for a free tool I know it saved me an hour of time which is huge for me.

If you have used PC Decrapifier I would like to know how it worked for you. I would also like to know if a better program exists. Please post feedback in the comments.