Bought a new HP, was teleported to 2005 and landed in Cr*pLand!

Been away from Windows for some years but just bought a new HP 340S G7 for a non-computer-savvy friend requiring it for studies (statistics course so unfortunately a Windows-based Excel is required for some special plug-ins and other Windows-applications).

Nice computer for that price and with additional 8GB of RAM (total 16 GB) and an i7 it’s pretty quick as well. Memory upgrade was a nightmare though – that laptop body required many of the iPhone-repair tools and HP’s crazy sticker rubber feet just didn’t got back 100% right.

But… All. This. Cr*p.

Starting the computer up and installing the school’s EDU Office 365 seemed like an easy task, but… HP’s take on Windows 10 is simply terrible! Sooooo much crap was installed. Hardest to remove was McAfee that had loaded up with AV, VPN and a Password Manager – all requiring separate reboots.

Second was all the crap Microsoft loaded onto the Start-menu; Mail, Microsoft 365 preview (for ALL Nordic + English languages so it needed to be uninstalled 5 times!), Solitair, Spotify, Groove Music, Films & TV, Play, Adobe Free Trials etc, etc.

Granted, with the exception of McAfee and Microsoft 365 they were all easy and quick to uninstall.

If my friend didn’t need the computer today, I would have gone through the hoops and downloaded a Windows ISO and nuked the machine from orbit and reinstalled everything. However, I am unsure of the Microsoft crap – would it have still been there?

Conversation 10 comments

  • anoldamigauser

    Premium Member
    01 September, 2021 - 9:39 am

    <p>If you go the ISO route, yes, you still get all the Microsoft crap. I am not sure if you should blame HP or Microsoft for the Adobe Free Trials though.</p>

  • dmclaurin

    01 September, 2021 - 1:39 pm

    <p>I have purchased several laptops over the last years, including an Acer and 3 HPs…and yes, they are loaded with crapware. I know it and I just uninstall all the crap out in less than 20 minutes.</p><p>Wish they did not pre-load it…but hey, they do! Just get rid of it and on to the next thing: to me it is just like having to take the laptop out of the box and its wrappers.</p>

  • hrlngrv

    Premium Member
    01 September, 2021 - 3:14 pm

    <p>A statistics curriculum which requires Excel may be <em>business</em> statistics. I’m familiar with several Excel add-ons, e.g., @Risk, which only work with Windows Excel, but real stats software (GNU R, SAS, MatLab with stats extensions) can do a lot more. From my perspective, learning to use real stats software with Excel is better in the long run than relying mainly on Excel. I pity your friend.</p>

    • hrlngrv

      Premium Member
      01 September, 2021 - 3:22 pm

      <p>Solitaire, Mail, Groove are on MSFT, but McAfee and Adobe are HP’s fault.</p><p><br></p><p>6 separate different languages for MS Office Preview likely saves HP money vs new PCs with Icelandic + English for Iceland, Danish + English for Denmark, etc. FWIW, wouldn’t machines for Finland need to include both Finnish and Swedish? Heck, it may be worse in a way for Latvians if their new HP machines come with Latvian, Russian and English.</p>

      • matsan

        02 September, 2021 - 12:18 am

        <p>Some parts of Finland are Swedish speaking so you are correct. Since the machine is “Nordic” it has all the languages and different letters printed on the keys. Common in the low- and mid-range, you have to advance in price to get into the professional segment to get rid of that (and I guess the other languages of Office). Pro-users would typically run the English version and add the Swedish language pack for spelling. </p>

    • matsan

      02 September, 2021 - 12:29 am

      <p>R is great. Used Matlab myself in school back in the mid-90s but the price of that software package made it (at that time) a pure EDU product. </p><p>Today I only encounter Matlab when doing projects in the university world. PhDs building “stand-alone” apps requiring the expensive Matlab runtime is unfortunately the norm there making it impossible to use outside the universities that Matlab sponsor. </p>

  • sevenacids

    01 September, 2021 - 5:02 pm

    <p>If you use a vanilla ISO, yes, you will get the Microsoft crap.</p><p><br></p><p>You can get rid of it, but that involves using deployment tools like DISM to mount the image, remove the provisioned apps you don’t want, and add registry keys to the default user profile so that crap à la Candy Crush does not download after first login (it’s called "Content Delivery Manager"). If you do that then you will be greeted with Windows 10 that has just Edge out of the box, and I strongly recommend to keep it even if not used because it tends to break cumulative updates under some conditions.</p>

  • adlton

    02 September, 2021 - 5:06 am

    <p>I do not think Mail, Groove Music, Movies and TV, Photos and similar inbox apps are crapware.</p><p><br></p><p>Modern operating system needs to have apps that serve as media players or are for simple media management inclued in OS, same for email and calendar in general</p><p><br></p><p>Those apps are not of great quality and maybe are not good enough for most of the power users but they are not crapware like Adobe Free Trials, McAffee and those games that now pollute Windows 10 start menu.</p>

  • c3141th

    Premium Member
    17 November, 2021 - 8:14 am

    <p><br></p>

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