@jaytkay Well, i suppose that is true as far as the browser plugins, but many programs do leave registry entries after uninstall, and these can cause a slowdown. And of course registry ‘doctors’ are completely useless.
And yes, they do give those removal programs, but they don’t always work. I wrestled with a norton firewall for over a week before finally killing it. A good reason to never pay money for antivirus programs.
And yes, acer recovery will help (as would just the Windows 7 restore disk program, though I admit I haven’t tested it yet), but again you have to get it to that state, which would require quite a few uninstalls as well as just general cleanup, such as removing start menu items which can be left by bad uninstallers and are simply annoying. And again, you’ll be left with extraneous registry entries, which will appear every time you restore to that state. I prefer a clean wipe.
However, I will agree that it simply will not be easy, and I cannot guarantee that the torrented version would work for a variety of reasons, OEM issues and viruses foremost. I don’t mind that sort of headache myself, I legitimately enjoy messing around with my stuff, but I won’t pretend that that’s at all normal. So, if you don’t feel like potentially taking a week to get your computer pristine, @jaytkay probably has the better idea. Sorry to have mislead you.