John Barnett Computer Journalist
Windows Vista™ Support

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Microsoft MVP

Remove OEM Branding From PC

Most new PCs are from branded manufacturer's and all of them insist upon letting you know exactly who you purchased your pc from by branding anything and everything within Windows Vista. They put their own toolbar images on the windows toolbar. They include their own title pages and a host of other, in my opinion, un-necessary page branding. We know who made the pc, we don't need it throwing in our faces.

Please Note

These instruction will remove the OEM branding from your machine. While you may feel that the branding is intrusive, I should point out that removing it may affect your pc's warranty. Therefore, if you intend removing the branding completely I suggest you leave it until after your warranty has expired.

To remove OEM (original Equipment manufacturer) branding do the following.

1/ Click Start

2/ On the Start menu click Run

3/ If the Run dialogue box is not available you will need to click on all programs>accessories and then click the Run option

4/ In the Run dialogue box type: 'Rundll32 IedkCS32.dll, BrandCleanInstallStubs' (without the quotes) and press OK

5/ User Account Control (UAC) will pop up a permissions dialogue box. If you are the administrator then simply press the Continue button. If you are not the administrator then you will need the administrator password before you can continue.

6/ Once you have give User Account Control the relevant permissions the the command in step 5 above will be executed and all OEM branding should now disappear.