Wednesday 17 December 2008

HP Bloatware on Business Machines…

We switched to reselling HP rather than Dell earlier this year and generally we’ve been very happy with the move. I’ve blogged about my dissatisfaction with Dell before so I wont go over it all again.  Suffice to say they’re not channel friendly despite what they may claim.

We’ve supplied a few bits of HP kit here and there and been pleased with what we’ve seen.  Last week we upgraded a five user network to HP kit and I was very disappointed to discover the large amount of bloatware shipping on the business machines we had supplied.

Something like a PDF reader I can accept, as well as HP’s various pieces of software – you’ll get that whatever the vendor. But when I discovered they’d installed the AOL IE Toolbar I felt they’d crossed the line.  Not only was this ugly toolbar taking up desktop space, they’d also changed the default search provider in the top right-hand corner to AOL and the homepage was some amalgamation between AOL and HP.

aol1

aol2

With consumer PCs I can accept a certain level of bloatware, this often helps the vendor keep the costs down and it’s just become the norm. But when you’re paying a premium for high-end HP laptops and desktops I expect them to be clean of such crap.

Unfortunately there’s nothing they’re going to do about it, I just expect better from HP.  I’ll just know in the future to include some extra time for each PC, to allow clean up before installing at customers.

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1 comment:

Andy _Parkes said...

It is disappointing

I agree with you that business PC's really shouldn't come with this stuff on

Compared to some of the other PCs I've seen the HPs aren't too bad

Still it's a pain when you have to uninstall them every single time!