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?
