Last week I was browsing the Internet on my DELL laptop at home, and for no apparent reason I found that I kept getting redirected from the Sky Broadband website to an utterly useless DELL Search page littered with ads. A bit of research into this annoying problem revealed this is not a new issue for DELL users. It's caused by DELL crapware that comes pre-installed on laptops, and people have been complaining about in the DELL user forums and in blogs for over a year already.
I found a few ways to remove it including using HijackThis (which does actually identify this DELL software as spyware) but the easy way is as follows:
- In Internet Explorer go to Tools - Options
- On the Programs tab click on Manage Add-On's
- Select CBrowserHelperObject (published by Dell Inc)
- In 'settings' at the bottom select Disable, and click OK.
Rant
What on earth were DELL thinking?! Can't see this is just going to piss people off and turn people away from DELL in the future? It does make me wonder if they'll do the same thing with the PC's they're now loading with Ubuntu ... maybe we'll see the DELL decrapifier for Linux soon?
What makes me the most angry is this is DELL search page is even worse than newdotnet in some ways ... at least with newdotnet you only get redirected when you visit a bad address. The DELL search page actually appears when you try to go to valid links!
