dealing with Dell Control Point

On Dell's E series of Latitude laptops, Dell Control Point is installed.  It's designed to manage network connections and power settings.  Unfortunately, it blows.  When setting up an E series laptop yesterday, I found connecting to WLAN and WWAN networks more complex using DCP than traditional means.  And they were the only means of controlling WLAN and WWAN connections.

Here's what I did:

I uninstalled Dell Control Point.  

The laptop had a Verizon 5720 WWAN card in it.  Listed in the downloads for that model of laptop in the communications category was a driver for it - and it included a program for connecting it.

For the Intel WLAN card, I had to go to the downloads section and download a driver for that, too - which of course included the stupid Intel utility, which we know how to disable from here.  But as stupid as it was, the Intel driver was already on the laptop (just not the Intel utility and the Windows utility was telling me that another program was controlling it - so I decided to install the Intel utility to tell it to have Windows control the WLAN card).  And the Dell driver I downloaded was older than the driver already on the laptop.  So I had to go to the Intel site to download the driver - and then I was able to download it and then set it to have Windows manage the WIFI.  

That's how I got rid of Dell Control Point.