INFO-Dell Bloatware-The Effect It Has On Your System

Dell Bloatware Test Results

There have been questions regarding what affect the bloatware Dell installs has on a system. Having one myself, I decided to test it because I did not know what services were dependent on each other. Here are my findings.

MY SCENARIO - I have driver updates through Windows update turned off. I manually manage my Intel drivers using the Intel Driver and Support Assist Tool available from Intel. I manage my bios and Dell specific drivers through Dell Command Update.

ACTION - I uninstalled all Dell apps, except Dell Command Update. Since I also keep my system backed up in case I have to recover, in bios I turned off Watchdog Timer, Auto OS recovery, Support Assist Auto Recovery, and Bios Connect. I then removed Dell Watchdog Timer Driver.


RESULTS

The installed Dell Command Update continued to work correctly. (I discovered that Dell also issues a standalone version of Command Update so one can use it without installation if desired. You just download the package and select extract the contents rather than choosing to install.)

Without Support Assist installed, when I went to Dell and entered my service tag, the “Let Dell Automatically Install Drivers for you” feature did not work. However, I was still given a list of drivers applicable for my service tag that can be manually downloaded.

After a restart, with 32gb of ram installed ram usage dropped dramatically from 24% to 16%. At idle, CPU runs at 1%.

Startup was noticeably faster.

Dell f12 hardware diagnostics continued to work correctly.

WARNING- Always backup your system before making changes.

The problem is defining what "bloatware" is. What's bloatware to you may be essential to me.

To this each individual has to decide on their own what they do and don't want on their machines. That requires a "proactive" approach - researching what said "bloatware" is.

@Dru2 Of course it is up to the individual. The information was just that...information, not advice to one person's needs. It was given so that the individual could make up his own mind. That's why I related everything to 'my scenario.'

Yeah, I got that, I was just posting the other side of the coin.

All good.

Pretty sure all brands of computers comes with different bloatware, i know all my HP's do ! So most of them i just delete !

I have mentioned this before in other threads, Dell sometimes add a startup partition to their higher end devices which performs various system checks and tests on each boot, which can seriously slow the startup which can annoy when you are doing major installs or if you reboot often .

If you rarely reboot this is not really an issue and can keep the system in good order - but can be switched off by tapping the F2 key Immediately after initial boot, ( this is often a hit or miss action as the active period is only a second or two)

Not on all systems but worth checking if you find a slow boot on Dell systems

I work the Dell forums, Support Assist seems to be the main "culprit". A lot of latency problems can be traced back to SA.

At power on, a POST (Power On Self Test) is run. I don't see that as a negative. Even my self built desktops do a POST.