New
#1
Reinstall Win 7 from scratch or remove cruft from new machine?
I have just replaced my wife's dying PC with a new win7 pro machine from Dell. In my past experience with Dell boxes, even the machines bought through their "for business" site pages have a lot of extra "cruft" that (a) we don't need, and (b) slows things down.
There are two approaches I can see to resolving this:
- Install Win 7 from scratch...voilá, no cruft (but takes a lot of work and time)
- Try to identify and eliminate the preinstalled cruft (takes less time but leaves the risks of either not getting everything unneeded off or accidentally deleting something essential and hosing things)
Any thoughts about a preferable approach? (And if the second choice is better, any advice about how to go about identifying the cruft that may not be obvious?)