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My parents got me an HP laptop from Best Buy for Christmas, and had the Geek Squad dudes remove the junkware for only like $20. I was thankful she did this, because this particular model comes swimming in an orgy of trialware.
do i need
activation assistant for the 2007 Microsoft Office Suite
ESU for Microsoft Vista
HP Customer Experience Enchancements
MSCU for microsoft vista
muvee autoProducer 6.0
roxio creator audio
roxio creator basic v9
roxio creator copy
roxio creator data
roxio creator easyarchive
roxio creator tools
roxio express labeler 3
roxio MyDVD basic v9
Yeah, you can remove those programs but make sure you really dont have any use to the Roxio DVD burning software or the muvee video editing software. As for as the ESU and MSCU are concerned, they are supposedly essential system/security updates for Vista but are not totally necessary. The HP customer enhancement and the Office trial activations are junk and can be removed safely. Make sure you have removed the trial Office 07 installation before removing the trial wizard.
Unless the process is different in Vista, the XP disks i burned from the recovery partition in XP MCE2005 act quite different from the Vista one I got from HP.
The XP disks total three disks and follow the following process:
1) format drive, 2) partition drive to have the 1GB quickplay, 11GB recovery and remaining for system, 3) copy the contents of the 3 DVD's to the 11GB recovery partition, 4) recovery the system partition using the newly created recovery partition.
The Vista disk I got from HP follows a different process:
1) format drive, 2) partition drive to have a 24GB partition for the system, 3) install vista, 4) copy over HP folders like SWSetup, 5) install drivers, 6) install crap software...and then i dont know what happens from there.
I canceled out of step 6 and never got the crap software installed or got any partitioning done. No crap software, no 1GB partition for QP, no 11GB recovery partition. Just a 24GB vista partition which i extended to the rest of my drive.
I think next time i will just use my Gateway upgrade CD, which apparently is a full install of Vista. It asks for an OEM key, which I of course have on the bottom of my HP laptop. Then when Windows asks to activate I will call Microsoft like I did last time (since canceling out of the crap software install like I did also cancels out of the HP activation process).
The only thing I disagreed with on this thread was the removal of the HP Help and Support. I initially thought it was bloatware as well but then I realized that was HP Totalcare. As far as I can tell the only thing HP Help and Support does is add HP specific help into Windows Help and Support. I think therefore it is pretty useful and does not detract in performance other then in less hard drive space that it uses up which is only like 25mb.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
