bloatware - razing my notebook and starting again

[Iam]

Yep, it's got far less crap than any other laptop I've used, but why the fuck did they use FAT32???

Is it the "utility partition"?

The utilities often written in old versions of DOS, I think...

 

[Xanadu]

No, it's the entire hard drive.

 

[ChrisFilter]

god i fucking hate vista...

If you've got 2GB of ram it's actually a fucking good OS.

 

[ExtraRefined]

This program is great for getting crap of your machine: ccleaner

ccleaner is pretty much useless for the problem the op mentions. Judicious use of Add Remove Programs, and sysinternals autoruns is the way to go if you'd prefer not to reformat & reinstall.

 

[Xanadu]

ccleaner is pretty much useless for the problem the op mentions. Judicious use of Add Remove Programs, and sysinternals autoruns is the way to go if you'd prefer not to reformat & reinstall.

that looks like one fucking awesome tool!

I *heart* sysinternals

 

[boskysquelch]

No, it's the entire hard drive.

for use with the Penguin?

 

[Hocus Eye.]

This post not directly relevant to HP laptops

I agree about the extra bloatware on the Sony Vaio. However once you have made your recovery disc you can recover the Operating System and the useful programs that came bundled but then don't install the Vaio software. This means that the computer boots up more quickly and you don't get the Vaio screen appearing.

I must admit I found Norton a nuisance frequently popping up and there was other Symentic software trying to load something else, so I replaced it with Zonealarm and AVG which I was familiar with from my previous computer. There also had been a problem of the computer trying to fire up IE and crashing when I had already set the default browser to Firefox. This problem disappeared after getting rid of the Vaio software. I then had no DVD burner but bought Ashampoo from the Zonealarm site for not much money.

Bundled software seems a great bargain on the face of it, but having it ready installed and not being provided with a disc is a real downside. I think all operating systems should be free of charge. Microsoft makes plenty of money from its Office programs, it is a bit like a motor car coming without a gearbox and having to pay extra for it.

 

[maes]

They do it because they get paid to - Norton, or AOL, or whoever, pays for that self-destruct-in-six-months installation of $shitty_app. Since selling PC hardware is such a cut-throat business, getting paid $30 per machine to install shite on it is a big deal breaker.

Yes it pisses people off. Do most people care enough about it to remove things, or figure out how to install and configure windows for themselves, or to return their cmputer and demand one not pre-laden with shite? Unfortunately not.

maestrocloud - if it's a reasonably recent HP machine, they expect you to burn your own recovery discs, which takes about 3 DVD's worth, as well as an hour of your time - cnuts (cos supplying you with recovery discs costs an extra $5 per machine!). You can do this if you want, and when you use them it'll restore your computer to the crapware-infested state you got it in.

If you're going to install a fresh copy of windows sans crapware, I'd be cautious - last time I did this with an HP nx7400 I discovered that not *all* drivers are downloadable from their website - IIRC there was a system management chip that showed up as an unknown device in device manager.

IMHO your best option for now would be to remove any shitty software they put on (Norton, all those shitty trials for backup software and the like) and replace the ones you need to with decent free alternatives (e.g. AVG antivirus).

As for Ubuntu - it comes as a live CD (i.e. it'll load up a desktop and you can use the applications and whatnot without it touching your hard drive or installing anything) to check that it works on your hardware - things to look out for are the graphics card and wireless working properly, since these are often poorly supported on Linux by the hardware manufacturers. If you find everything works, the Ubuntu installer should be able to partition (divvy up) your hard drive automatically.

P.S. IME, laptops aimed at businesses have significantly less bloatware bollocks installed on them

ah cheers for the really comprehensive response!

Will start purging complete shite asap, once I've made the stupid recovery disks. Do you reckon I can just make ISOs of the disks and put them on an external hd to save buying DVDs?

The other thing is my increasing loathing of vista, do you reckon as it came with it its gonna be tricky to get it to run correctly with another OS and probably missing drivers, like the nx7400 you mentioned?

<shakes fist at cunty manufacturers>

 

[ExtraRefined]

Will start purging complete shite asap, once I've made the stupid recovery disks. Do you reckon I can just make ISOs of the disks and put them on an external hd to save buying DVDs?

It could be done in theory, but it's unlikely to be worth the effort. You'd need to expand the files onto a bootable usb drive, or use pxe boot.

The other thing is my increasing loathing of vista, do you reckon as it came with it its gonna be tricky to get it to run correctly with another OS and probably missing drivers, like the nx7400 you mentioned?

What in particular do you have against vista? Might be better to try and fix the problem, rather than reinstall xp - you'll only end up installing it anyway in a few years once stuff stops getting xp ports.

 

[stdPikachu]

Will start purging complete shite asap, once I've made the stupid recovery disks. Do you reckon I can just make ISOs of the disks and put them on an external hd to save buying DVDs?

Yup, if you have an external that's just as good. If it's the same software that I've used, there'll be a confusingly named option to get it to spit out raw ISO's instead of burning direct to DVD, which obviously you can burn at your leisure (providing your laptop isn't up the spout and you have someone else to burn DVD's for you )

The other thing is my increasing loathing of vista, do you reckon as it came with it its gonna be tricky to get it to run correctly with another OS and probably missing drivers, like the nx7400 you mentioned?

My immediate reaction would be to suck it'n'see, but then I'm inclined to break things like that What's the model number of your lappy? Ten to one it'll run XP if you can find a copy that'll install nicely - Vista is usually the one that has problems with drivers, for now at least. I'm not aware of any hardware that works in Vista but not in XP.

To be fair, the non-recognised system management thingy on the nx7400 didn't seem to afffect anything whatsoever, other than that annoying question mark.

TIP: if you have a portable HDD then great. Chances are that if you look in your C: drive there'll be a folder (possibly hidden) called SETUP, DRIVERS, i386 or something similar - this usually contains the installation files for all of the drivers and software that's preloaded onto your machine (cos system preparation typically involves blowing a standard basic image onto every HDD, then the drivers for model XYZ are copied onto these things when the HDD is plugged into a model XYZ chassis, and then the drivers and things install themselves during the initial power up autoconfigure thingy). Anyway, if you can find this folder, copy it onto your external drive, it should only be a few hundred MB.

As an aside, I fiddled with Vista on my laptop for a couple of hours before I decided it wasn't even worth keeping it around for dual boot. Kubuntu for the win, as they say (inexplicably. Can't they just say "yay!" or something a bit less stupid sounding?).

<shakes fist at cunty manufacturers>

Join the queue! Annoyingly thorough reply comes from having to deal with this shitty state of affairs on an all too regular basis.

P.S. if you are tempted to give one of the flavours of Ubuntu a try in the near future, I'd recommend installing the 7.10 (aka Gutsy) version rather than the 7.04 (Feisty), since Feisty is about to be superceded. And if you're going to install a copy of XP, don't use the entire hard disc - partition the disc up first. But that's all complicated stuff whch can wait for now.

 

[maes]

My immediate reaction would be to suck it'n'see, but then I'm inclined to break things like that What's the model number of your lappy? Ten to one it'll run XP if you can find a copy that'll install nicely - Vista is usually the one that has problems with drivers, for now at least. I'm not aware of any hardware that works in Vista but not in XP.

This is a tx1000.

To be fair, the non-recognised system management thingy on the nx7400 didn't seem to afffect anything whatsoever, other than that annoying question mark.

ah, well, that's not the end of the world then!


just made a chunky new partition, gonna install 'gutsy' on there & see how that gets on. fanks!

 

[stdPikachu]

Blargle, you might well have a problem with the graphics card/screen and the wireless on the tx1000 (it's a tablet, right?). Graphics card can be fixed by installing the "restricted" nVidia drivers, and the wireless'll have to be a suck it an' see option I'm afraid.

Anyhoo, hope it's behaving a bit better now.