Disputes are meant to be used to remove erroneous information from your reports. It’s a bad idea to dispute a valid derogatory tradeline because a) it’s legit and therefore is supposed to be reported, and b) disputing an old tradeline, especially one that isn’t updating, often causes your scores to take a hit because suddenly it’s pushed into the spotlight and refreshed. You may get lucky and have something deleted, but far more often, you cause your scores to take a hit and don’t end up with the derog going away until its natural drop date anyway.
If you want to remove old baddies, you send goodwill letters to try and have them removed. Not disputing legit entries is a good rule of thumb. You usually end up causing more harm, or at best have no change.
