Can I remove the HP stuff on the laptop?

Over the summer my girlfriend bought an HP laptop that she has had nothing, but problems with. The HP updates have wiped her system 3 times and even locked her out of the laptop (there was no previous password yet she still couldn't get in). I don't know if this is because HP will no longer support their PCs or what, but it is starting to get quite annoying. Can I just remove all the HP stuff from her laptop or does the laptop need it?

 

You don't have to use the bloatware that comes from the company. Bear in mind though there may be a few things that you need to keep installed. Things like hp update you can get rid of.

 

I have a hp mini 5102 running Windows 7 Ultiamte with no bloatware but the volume and brightness level indicators are very slow to respond to changes (sometimes taking 3-5 seconds to pop up and then move accordingly). Are those bars native to Windows or is it part of a hp program?

 

Why are you running Ultimate on a netbook? There is absolutely no benefit in that, IMO. As a matter of fact, unless you know how to logically configure Windows startup, you are most likely running several processes you will never need. And slowing your system down at that. You are running with an Atom CPU and two gig RAM max. I am guessing that you have the Aero interface enabled by the way you state that your system is slow to respond to changes? I am really not trying to be a jerk, however, there is a reason that HP ships Windows 7 Starter edition with those units in the first place - the system just does not have the specs to handle a fully-loaded Windows 7 OS without the slowdown. Though, if you truly want the benefits of the OS, I would at least disable Aero transparency. You would be surprised in the performance gain from that alone.

 

Ultimate and Aero work just fine on a netbook, such as the 5101 I used to have. When I had it, I tested all configs like 512MB, 1GB and 2GB ram. Win7 worked just fine with all of those, of course it would swap a bit but also used less resources and didn't load all processes right away.

That indicator software (can't remember the name now but black-ish window with blue bars?) is super-slow and deserves to be removed and replaced if necessary.

 

I respect your response but I'm only running W7Ultimate because I bought it used and it came with it. And FWIW, Aero is already turned off. The overall performance with Ultimate isn't my issue, it runs respectably fast. My main issue is just the volume/brightness overlay. But since I haven't seen special volume/brightness bars in Vista (other than from Quickset on my Dell) or other systems with Windows 7, I figured its a proprietary hp overlay.

Yep, that's the one, awful little bugger, isn't it?

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-drivers-software-forum/519991-popular-hp-notebook-software.html
"HP On-Screen Display Utility"

I thought it had some fancier name but I'm lazy to find out, too late

You could try to update that latest version listed in that thread.

Also, if it doesn't help you could simply uninstall it. Since it pretty much just tells you screen got brighter or dimmer, or volume louder/quieter... those things are pretty obvious without OSD too

 

Cool, I'll just remove it knowing it isn't part of something more crucial to the systems operation.