I had a convo with @InstKamra at work today about removing the standard crap that comes with all new vendor systems. I usually embark on a painstaking process to meticulously uninstall, reboot, verify leftover files and registry entries, then install my preferred software. It’s a process I’ve done dozens if not 100+ times and it’s always worth it- Windows Add/Remove couldn’t uninstall white from rice. (*rimshot!*)

@InstKamra mentioned that Windows 7 was supposed to be better at managing these things, and I had some time to kill while I was setting everything up, so I used Revo Uninstaller and Google Docs to put together some numbers. In the end, according to Revo in Moderate mode, there were 1,048 files and 182 leftover registry entries from uninstalling 17 pieces of crapware. Follow the Google Docs link for a full table: Dell XPS 300 Leftover Junk.

I’ve also listed my go-to cadre of must have pieces of Windows FREEWARE, and I don’t say that lightly. I just might take these to my grave on a thumbdrive:

• Avast Anti-virus
• Revo Uninstaller
• Chrome w/ Adblock Plus
• Defraggler
• Codestuff Starter
• Sysinternals Desktops
• Lastpass

Once I downloaded Defraggler I ran a quick Analyze and found the following horrendous state of hard drive fragmentation:

• 1,065 Fragmented Files across 9.6 GB
• 7,035 Total Fragments
• 27% Fragmentation
• 35.2GB hard drive space used

And this is a barebones system right now! Aggh! I can’t wait to dualboot with Ubuntu, but first I have to get Steam on here so I can play Skyrim in all its visual glory. Insert image of me as a kid in a candy shop here.

The ceremony was as powerful as one can expect. We lucked out with a great spot in the crowd, and the Honor Band, Honor Guard, and Color Guard were pretty close to us. At some point all the phones in the crowd came out and we eventually figured out that the POTUS was just through the other side of the crowd.

I took photos, but due to gadget misplacement I only had my cell phone and not an actual camera. I’m still glad I got what I did though, and you can find them here: Veteran’s Day 2011. There’s also a few videos, but they’re crappy cellphone videos with constant wind noises that I probably won’t take the time to edit.

As I’ve mentioned, I also want to blog the trip and get photos up soon, before I get caught up in other To Do’s. In attempting to do so today, I’ve learned that when Gallery Remote asks for a caption it really wants a filename. So I’ve been putting lengthy “captions” into fields that are only sized to fit filenames, truncating a lot of the text in the photo album. I’m annoyed, so I thought I’d vent here. I’m going back to fix it, but it’ll take some time.