I have a lot of computers at home and at work, but my daily driver at home is an old Precision 380 in which none of the parts are original except the case and the motherboard (not even the CPU, which I replaced with the very underrated Pentium Extreme Edition). So it's dated, but with the memory maxed out and with a GeForce Titan in there, it suits my needs quite decently; I like gaming on a PC, but most of my PC gaming is plodding through stacks of games I bought years (decades?) ago and still haven't played or finished, and if I want to play something newer I just use my Gen 9 gaming console.
Due to a hard drive going bad, I did a fresh Win10x64 install on a new drive 3 years ago, and haven't installed much else on it besides web browsers, Office, the Steam client and a few Steam games, the Blizzard client and a few Blizzard games, and a few games from GOG. It has been running great since the fresh install... until starting last week.
I had not had any Dell apps on there; at worst I had a couple of Dell drivers. But last week on 11/27/2024, Windows Update decided that it needed to install Dell Core Services and Alienware Update on there. And that's when everything went to hell.
I noticed an immediate and drastic slowdown of my system. There was a service called Dell Data Management that would claim >5GB of RAM and 25% of my CPU cycles; another culprit, though not as bad, was Dell Instrumentation. Their system utilization would continue to grow as the system uptime increased - and usually, by the time I was ready to shut down the system, I actually could not do so without first task-killing the Dell Data Management service.
Sorting my app list in reverse installation order, the most recent entry was Alienware Update, so I removed it first, and did a few reboots, etc. Doing so had no real effect; Alienware Update was gone from the Apps list, but the DDM and DI services were still around hogging up my resources.
So this morning I attempted to uninstall Dell Core Services. The process seemed to complete successfully. But nothing happened; DCS is still there in the Apps list, multiple reboots later, and DDM and DI are still running as resource-hogging services.
Does anybody have any ideas? The oldest System Restore Point I seem to have is 11/29, which is two days after the update of damnation. And anyway, I would prefer the more straightforward approach of uninstalling this uninstallable Dell bloatware if I can.
Dell Core Services Client Causing Havoc
Topic: Removal of Preinstalled Dell Software on XPS 8930 @ AskWoody
What are the absolute minimum Dell applications that one must keep??
What is the RIGHT PROCEDURE to REMOVE Dell Bloatware
Videos
Hello,
We’ve received a pile of new Dell notebooks.
Mine in particular keeps messing up, restarting, shutting down, overusing CPU etc.
There’s a ton of Dell apps installed that I want to get rid of, so I’m asking:
What’s the absolute minimum required Dell apps that I must keep??
What can I safely get rid of??
I do want to keep Dell Command/Update so it updates the drivers etc.
I do know Chrome is one of the problems, it’s overusing CPU and RAM and it never did this on other notebooks.
There’s also a ton of Intel stuff installed, same questions.
I think I just might wipe it via Intune and let it set up thusly and see what happens.
Thank you, Tom
I know there’s Optimizer, Pair, Display Manager, Peripheral Manager, etc.
Hi Ron, you can safely uninstall the following:
Dell Customer Connect
Dell Digital Delivery
Dell Help and Support
Dell Product Registration
Dell Support Assist & Remediation & Agent
Dell Update
Dell Update - SupportAssist Update Plugin
Hi Ron, I would leave those in the drivers section, they will be small and not use your system resources . . .
With regards to Power Manager, I would also leave that service alone as that may be required for the good running of your system, Dell systems typically have some very specific parts that may require power management . . .