New HP laptop (1 Viewer)

[Steve Weeks]

I just bought my wife an HP laptop for Christmas. I braved the nightmare of Best Buy the day after THanksgiving, and got a good deal. Now I am trying to get it set up before I wrap it up. I would like to get rid of all the crap that comes pre-installed, all the trial software and ads for things I don't want. I have heard horror stories about some of this stuff being difficult to remove, and even reinstalling itself. I recall seeing a link to step-by0step instructions for cleaning up a new computer, it was for a specific brand (Dell I believe.) If anyone could lead me to something similar for HP, I would be very appreciative.

The laptop also has a DVD burner, and I would like to make a backup disk before I wrap it up as well (remember when those came with a new computer?) Should I use the + or - format, and would I need to use a double layer disk, or is a single layer fine, or would even a CD-Rom have enough space to do the backup?

Thanks for your help on this.

Steve

 

[Bryan X]

I bought my wife a Dell notebook for Christmas too, and just finished cleaning it up and setting it up for our home network before wrapping it.

It's pretty easy to unistall all the crap that comes preloaded. Ninety-nine percent of it or even more likely all of it you should be able to uninstall through the 'Add/Remove Programs' in the Control Panel. You may have to reboot after some of the uninstalls so it can take a while. There was nothing on my Dell that I couldn't uninstall in this fashion.

After that I loaded the Office software, Zone Alarm, and Avast! anti-virus. I got the home network set up and printer sharing.

As for backing it up, a CD will not be big enough to hold the backup data. You'll need to use a DVD. Whether you use a + or - is really only dependent upon what your DVD burner supports. If it supports both, it really doesn't matter which you use. If it only supports one, well....

Expect the clean up and installing of security software to take a good hour or so with all the reboots you'll probably have to do. I spent probably two hours between that and setting up the home network. Other than the time, it's really pretty painless.

 

[Steve Weeks]

The DVD burner is +/-. I seem to recall that one format was better for music and video, and the other for data and backups. Not sure which was which, or if that was just someone spouting something off the top of their head as a fact.

 

[Parker Clack]

Steve:

As Bryan said just use the Add/Remove Programs from the Control Panel which will remove the majority of the crap that HP puts on to the drive. A DVD+R or RW will do just fine. No need for a dual layer.

Parker