Update on Dell Spyware
Yesterday's Dell laptop adventure proved to be even more of a challenge than I initially suspected. After formatting the drive and reinstalling XP Pro, I discovered that this model apparently doesn't come with a Resource CD like previous Dells my company purchased.
No big deal, except for one thing - all the drivers for the machine are on the Resource CD. So I got to spend an hour or so downloading all the drivers from Dell's site and burning them onto a CD so I could get the laptop working properly. No big deal, just time-consuming and annoying.
For a non-technical person, however, this problem would make it difficult (if not impossible) to reload the machine and get rid of the spyware without considerable technical assistance. Yeah, I did it - but I work in IT and have the necessary skillset to handle a problem like this. Joe Six-Pack probably doesn't.
Anyway, I made a Ghost image from yesterday's laptop and used it to load the other two, so it all worked out okay, I guess. It still bugs the shit out of me that Dell would pull something like this, though. Idiots.
No big deal, except for one thing - all the drivers for the machine are on the Resource CD. So I got to spend an hour or so downloading all the drivers from Dell's site and burning them onto a CD so I could get the laptop working properly. No big deal, just time-consuming and annoying.
For a non-technical person, however, this problem would make it difficult (if not impossible) to reload the machine and get rid of the spyware without considerable technical assistance. Yeah, I did it - but I work in IT and have the necessary skillset to handle a problem like this. Joe Six-Pack probably doesn't.
Anyway, I made a Ghost image from yesterday's laptop and used it to load the other two, so it all worked out okay, I guess. It still bugs the shit out of me that Dell would pull something like this, though. Idiots.
posted by Realist @ 12:54 PM
1 Comments:
At 9:40 AM,
Anonymous said…
I recently purchased a PC from dell that came preinstalled with dell's spyware. My browser settings were hijacked to the dell my way site. dell's line on the whole thing was that between the time I uninstalled the Mcaffee AV and installed Norton some bad person must have hacked my system and installed spyware that point my browser to the dell site. I want to know where they are getting their weed from...sounds good.
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