New HP laptop loaded with bloatware - keep/discard what?

Here are some tips to Clean up factory bloatware.

Best however to Clean Reinstall following these tips: Reinstalling Windows 7

With HP's you can leave the Recovery Partition and it will still run from boot even if you reinstall to C. There is a minimal Recover option on new HP's which is very close to a Clean Reinstall - you'll just need to discard the useless Wireless Manager which adds 30 seconds to boot time in favor of Win7's superior one.

You can also extract favorite apps from the Recovery Disks so you don't have to have them all: Extract HP 3rd Party Software from RecovCD

Hi there
Most computers come with a load of of pre-installed bloatware and a stupid hidden partition.

What I would do is

1) Backup your running image using acronis or any stand alone backup program --save to external USB disk for example. Note any serial numbers such as possibly pre-installed ms office.

2) Install the RETAIL version of W7 you want --whether Professional, home premium or ultimate

3) Re-install any apps such as Ms office. Activate with the key you got from the initial install.

Now you should be good to go.

Cheers
jimbo

Having the Recovery Disks and suggested backup image should be enough, although if you have the space and feel better about having the Recovery partition as another backup on the HD, you can keep it there until later when you reevaluate perhaps because you need the space.

Of course, Recovery from that partition would need to be done to the same HD, while the Recov Disks and Installation DVD can be used on the SSD or any other HD.

Good to hear back. Enjoy it!

Let us know if any issues come up.

I would leave the "bloatware" alone.

• Instead, I'd simply find out if any of it auto-runs at startup (and disable that).
• I'd see if any of it runs as background services (and disable them).
• Then I'd find their shortcuts in the Start Menu and either delete them or move them to a Junk folder.

Result: No junkware for now, but it's entirely there if you should have any future, unforeseen need. And you're not damaging anything. The only "bloat" is a few GB of storage. But on a 250 GB drive that's rather trivial.