infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

Street Tech points to a blog post that relates a story about purchasing a Dell from a retail outlet. When the customer finalized the sale, the salesman asked him if he wanted to spend $20 to have the store techs remove all of the trialware from the machine. I imagine the folks at Dell can’t be too happy about this since I’m sure they have contracts with AOL, Real, and a variety of other ISVs to put trialware on their machines. Potential DMCA violations aside, this proves how little interest Dell shows in caring for their customers is vendors are offering to fix the computers out of the box. I had a lame sales job at Dell one summer, and customers would often ask to have their machine shipped without Real, AOL, or other trialware. Although there were multitudes of customization options available, these trial packages were non-negotiable, often raising the ire of customers. Fortunately, there’s a script called Dell Decrapifier that removes these packages for customers able to find it online.