Breaking Out The Broom on HP: Removing Unwanted Applications

All major PC manufacturers have their own suite of applications tey like to use for their images which are laid onto your PC. Very often it has to do a lot more with who is giving you what incentives to include their application, rather than installing the best application for the price. Since all of them do it, we can’t just single out HP, but we can comb through what they give us and uninstall and make it ours. In the next few columns we will go over some applications that were pre-installed and left to be setup by the end user (you and me).

As simple as going to the Control Panel and selecting “Add or Remove Programs”...

New Vista Control Panel View. Look for “Uninstall a Program”, bottom left.

Windows Vista Control Panel Normal View

Vista Classic View. Look for Program Features in the display of icons.

Windows Vista Control Panel Classic View

After carefully reviewing what HP offers as initially installed programs, we opted out of a few services in lie of some other choices we feel will better suit our needs. As you can see in the section prior, Norton is not an application we are fond of in terms of running stable and secure PC’s. Well, it’ll be so secure you’ll have a hard time even using the internet speeds you are paying for.

Here is the list of programs we chose to uninstall and a short description as to why:

Yahoo Toolbar - Other than being Gmal users, we also prefer Google Toolbar which is linked to Google Desktop, Gmail, and a few other Google services we are fans of.
Vongo - A movie download service we are not interested in at this time, but if you are feel free to keep it.
Rhapsody - Yet another music service and player. We are actually quite happy with Windows Media, Zune, and iTunes for now.
Norton Internet Security - We believe there are better free alternatives than this around.
Muvee autoProducer 6 - For the price, we can find other suitable options to serve our needs.
Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 - If you have it, it is an extremely useful tool. However if you are looking to save money, free options are available with extra’s and lots of support.
Live Update 3.2 - Since we are not using Norton, there’s no need for Live Update
Hp Adviser Toolbar - Have read plenty of reviews calling it a nuisance and when there’s a youtube video for how to remove it, you know it’s serious.
Activation for Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 - Since we are not using Office 2007, we have no need for it’s activation program.

Keeping in mind that we are going to make full use of the Microsoft Suite of products, we will now outline some of the free programs we are installing for security and operability of Vista.

Zone Alarm - Hands down the best free firewall you can get for any Windows based operating system.
Ccleaner - An all around cleanup tool that can clean out the trash in less then 2 minutes*. *Dependant on harware.
Spybot S&D - A useful utility in background monitoring in order to keep your PC safe.
Avg Anti-Virus 8 - A useful and functional tool in Anti-Virus protection, and yes, free for home use.
Open Office - A free alternative to Microsoft’s Office package. It includes a suite of products that will prove extremely useful.
Google Desktop - A utility that is used to replace the use of Microsoft’s system search included with Vista. Google Desktop has been known to have bugs at times, but is a very stable program with plenty of support and backing. Most importantly it works.
Google Earth - A utility more geared towards fun, it gives you the ability to view the world as if you atop a satellite with a super telescope that zoomed in and out on command.