• How best to decrapify?

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    #2685020

    I am being attentive to the discussion about setting up a Windows 11 Pro machine because I am considering purchasing a new HP Win11 Pro laptop directly from HP in the hopes of minimizing crapware.  My two initial goals would be to remove the crapware and to set it up with two local accounts, one as administrator, one as a standard user.

    Regarding crapware, I currently have a Win10 Home HP laptop that took me awhile to remove all of the crap yet I remained torn about removing the HP utilities. I was annoyed by a number of them always running in the background yet could not bring myself to remove then because I thought they may someday be of value.  After 8 years, it ended up that I have only used them to look up the PC model/serial number information.  I have read about doing a clean installation of the OS from a download using the media creation tool.  This seems drastic.  Is there any difference between doing that versus using the Windows “Reset this PC” utility without enabling the restoration of preinstalled apps option?

    Do I want the HP tools and utilities?  I assume that I would need to restore preinstalled apps to get them but does that mean that I would all the crapware back too, or is there a way to control what is restored?

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    • #2685038

      In the past I have always done it by clean installing from a USB, but https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/recovery-options-in-windows-31ce2444-7de3-818c-d626-e3b5a3024da5 this page implies reset PC will remove manufacturer apps.  I would make a backup image first.

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    • #2685159

      Do I want the HP tools and utilities?

      On a new machine, I would personally avoid a clean install out of the gate and keep the OEM utilities for a while.  Check them out and you’ll know what’s junk and what might be useful later.  Disable any you don’t want running a boot using Task Manager.

      Also, it may be away a clean install may not preserve the original WinRE recovery partition.

      What I know for certain is that early (possibly impulsive) decisions on a new machine can create headaches later.  If you routinely make image backups, it would be the first thing I would do on a new machine and at each step along the way.

      Search the AskWoody forums on setting up new machines.

       

       

       

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