Reinstall Win 7 from scratch or remove cruft from new machine?

[camner]

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:

1. Install Win 7 from scratch...voilá, no cruft (but takes a lot of work and time)
2. 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?)

 

[fireberd]

I don't find new PC's have all the "bloatware" that older PC's (e.g. Win XP PC's) had.

Check out the PCDecrapifier that will help remove unwanted programs (and be careful that you don't eliminate a needed program). The PC Decrapifier Wipes Unwanted Junk | The PC Decrapifier

I can't say what is or isn't needed, as we have no idea what model Dell or what is installed on it.

 

[gregrocker]

Clean Up Factory Bloatware

Clean Reinstall Windows 7 Factory OEM

 

[AddRAM]

Just remove the software you don`t want, then use Ccleaner on the registry.

https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner