Dear OEMs: Please stop pre-installing “Compatibility Pack for the 2007 Office System”.
February 9, 2011Seriously. OK? Stop it. It’s freaking stupid. It just shows how worthless your company’s software-development folks are.
You pre-load Office 2010 or Office 2007, and yet also install Office 2003’s compatibility pack for Office 2007 files? What’s your damn problem? How do you not understand that Office 2007 and 2010 can ALREADY OPEN their own file types? Why do you keep installing “Compatibility Pack for the 2007 Office System” on these PCs?
The ONLY thing it can do is cause compatibility PROBLEMS. It’s ONLY supposed to be installed on computers using Office 2003, trying to open a 2007 document (xlsx, docx, pptx, etc.)
p.s.: stop loading computers with BS software nobody wants and will never use, e.g. amazon links, toolbars, Windows Live Essentials, Microsoft Works, Toshiba ConfigFree, Face Recognition, online backup, “PC Health” checkers, blah blah blah.
FalconFour's Perpetual Musings 
Or at least provide us a unified uninstaller for all this bullshit.
Or better, have the installers for all your stuff in a nice folder on the desktop. So I can install one or two if they are worth something and delete the rest. I’m not keen on all of those left-over registry settings. xP
Why don’t you just delete it yourself?
Hear, hear!
Agree 🙂
+1!
Re: “p.s.: stop loading computers with BS software nobody wants and will never use, e.g. amazon links, toolbars, Windows Live Essentials, Microsoft Works, Toshiba ConfigFree, Face Recognition, online backup, “PC Health” checkers, blah blah blah. ”
Unfortunately I don’t think these are going to disappear any time soon, since I’m pretty sure the manufacturer gets some sort of commission for including anything from a 3rd party. It also helps pave the way for you to buy a new one in a few years because things are running too slow. Only solution to that is to perform a clean install from a real OS install disc (a system recovery disc or partition usually just puts all that junk back on). While you’re at it, why not install YOUR choice of OS, just hope that the drivers are available!
Sure, you can uninstall things here and there, but it’s usually not as good as never having it installed in the first place. And considering the money you spend on a new machine, you shouldn’t have to be bothered with it. If they’re going to preload a bunch of things you don’t need, at their profit and your inconvenience, then how about lowering the price accordingly?
its there so you can open office files in microsoft works,
There is one semi-unified uninstaller for all this crap, free, check it out at http://www.PCDecrapifier.com
I freaking love it when people exert only the tiny iota of effort to read only part of a title, then think they’re leaving an insightful and inspiring comment that completely misses the entire point of the post while assuming the author is a complete idiot. Thanks.
Dell had their Vostro line of “business” PCs which came with Windows AND NOTHING BUT WINDOWS. No special Dell Utilities, no 3rd party anything, just pure, clean Windows.
The idea was they were going into a business environment with an IS/IT department that would install Office, security and other programs required by the business. The usual shovelware would just be removed anyway, leaving behind orphan files, folders and registry data to cause trouble, so the Vostro line left it out to save corporate tech staff and Dell a ton of support headaches.
Microsoft could have avoided all such issues long ago by implementing a very strict tracking system that would monitor 100% of everything a program installer put on the system, then would sweep up behind the uninstall to ensure that 100% of the program was gone.
For Windows 9x there was a 3rd party program which did exactly that. Rosenthal Uninstall. It launched right before Windows and sat all tiny and quiet in the background, watchdogging whenever a new program was installed. When you uninstalled a program, you could run RU afterwards and it would find all the junk left behind and delete it. It worked beautifully. I installed some stuff then uninstalled it and a before and after compare of files etc showed no difference, it was as if the programs had never been installed. Didn’t work with Windows NT, 2K and later because they don’t go through that brief ‘dos mode’ period during boot where ‘legacy’ software can load.
Why hasn’t Windows had such a feature built in for the past 18 years????
I won’t give my identity nor my firm’s name because they’re dishonest asholes and would penalize me for speaking on the net about their practices ; just know that I work as a computer tech for a Services firm. We basically do the ( sometimes same ) work for several client brands, amongst them Acer, Dell and Hewlett-Packard.
It’s perfectly known by our department that we are installing all kinds of shits that *will* cause problems. And, sadly, we will continue no matter how hard people complain, for several reasons. Amongst them :
• we are paid to do so, obviously.
• the brands we install do pay to have a forced presence in your system. Think of it as extremely aggressive advertisement.
• if the system breaks because *you* un-installed stuff, that’s not covered by the guaranties – if *you* break it, you *pay* for restoration and data salvage. Yes that’s racket. And time bomb sabotage. We call it « programmed obsolescence ».
To add insult to injury, when we do salvage data and files ( if the end user do not pay for advanced services or if we’re overbooked, the boss often gives the order to skip and sacrifice otherwise perfectly salvageable files to work quicker – yes that means you may have paid for data rescue but we won’t do it all the same ) when we actually do the work we have been paid for did I said, we do it with FREEWARE stuff grabbed on the Net. We don’t even use professional licensed software. We mainly use FalconFour’s Ultimate Boot CD, Hiren’s Boot CD, Trinity Rescue Kit and a Knoppix.
I absolutely hate that. But without work, no money, so I just shut the fuck up and do my job as ordered because it’s bloody difficult to find a job nowadays and they will fire me if I complain.
So please, people, be extremely HARD on your sales contracts and write down that you don’t want that shit installed. And when possible, sue ! For as long as there won’t be any clear laws against such (mal)practices they will go on, because money is the only thing that counts in this shitty occidental civilisation.