The PC Decrapifier

So Mr. or Ms. Brown just delivered to your door a bunch of brand-spankin' new Dell computers. Boxes piled up all over the place. You unbox the first tower and spend boocoo amounts of time deleting all the garbage Dell thinks you and/or your users are just dying to have. Then you Ghost it and image the rest of them. But now, thanks to Jason York, there's a better way.

The PC Decrapifier does exactly what it's name says it does. You run the PC-Decrapifier-x.x.x.exe program and it scans your new PC. It gives you a list of the semi-useless junkware Dell has installed, all pre-checked. Scroll down the list and remove check marks from the stuff you want to keep, and then the junk goes to Bitland. Jason also has a blog here on the program. Just wish I'd known about it the last time I got a multi-machine order.

The price can't be beat, 20 US and it's a per technician license, not a per PC. Besides having a perfectly hysterical name, it's a sweet little utility that any network admin will want to have on their Utilities CD.

Thumbs Down: Agnitum's OutpostPro Firewall

For grins and giggles, I tested Agnitum's OutpostPro firewall. Current firewall is just fine, except it would be nice to eyeball programs as they interact with the web.

OutpostPro has a lot of potential, except for the little things that make the difference with this network admin. Firstly, when you're viewing the logs, you can't right-click on an IP address to do a WHOIS search on it. I know, I know, it seems petty, but it sure is a time saver. Secondly, when adding rules on the fly, you can put in a range of ports, but not a range of IP addresses!?! Finally, when I tried running my HTML editor, Outpost blocked it automatically. It said my editor was trying to inject something into it. First time it happened, Outpost did give me the option to add my editor to the exclusions list, which I did, with no joy. When I went to the exclusions list, my editor wasn't listed. So I added my editor manually and still no joy. Looked all through the program settings/options/help and could never find out what why it wouldn't let it work. Nor could I find anything in the logs saying my editor had ever been ran, evaluated, banned, nada.

Too bad as it was nice to be able to manage a firewall via application or protocol. If it's still around in a year or so, I might give it a go again.