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HP Quietly Installs System-Slowing Spyware On Its PCs, Users Say (computerworld.com)
It hasn't been long since Lenovo settled a massive $3.5 million fine for preinstalling adware on laptops without users' consent, and it appears HP is on to the same route already. According to numerous reports gathered by news outlet Computer World, the brand is deploying a telemetry client on customer computers without asking permission. The software, called "HP Touchpoint Analytics Service", appears to replace the self-managed HP Touchpoint Manager solution. To make matter worse, the suite seems to be slowing down PCs, users say. From the report: Dubbed "HP Touchpoint Analytics Service," HP says it "harvests telemetry information that is used by HP Touchpoint's analytical services." Apparently, it's HP Touchpoint Analytics Client version 4.0.2.1435. There are dozens of reports of this new, ahem, service scattered all over the internet. According to Gunter Born, reports of the infection go all the way back to Nov. 15, when poster MML on BleepingComputer said: "After the latest batch of Windows updates, about a half hour after installing the last, I noticed that this had been installed on my computer because it showed up in the notes of my Kaspersky, and that it opened the Windows Dump File verifier and ran a disk check and battery test." According to Gartner, HP was the largest PC vendor in the quarter that ended in September this year.
It doesn't matter if its spying or not most 'value added' crap, computer manufacturers installs slows the computer. Rarely do they add to the performance of the PC. Hp printer installers are the worst for installing garbage you don't need.
I don't see how this is news. If you find a great deal or otherwise find yourself in the possession of a pre-built PC then the first thing you do is wipe the whole system and install fresh (could be Linux, Windows, dual-whatever-boot, or even OSX).
This has been normal since at least 20+ years ago. Did you not know this? Are you geeks or morons?
I have way too much end user computing experience...vendor's junkware is very familiar to me. One of the things I do a lot when building a master disk image for a company is try to determine which pieces of junkware really are needed to control built-in hardware. HP laptops are a really good example...the backlights, screen brightness, volume, etc. are controlled by a massive pig of a WPF application that needs to be installed or the devices won't work 100%. On a new install, you can actually push one of the control keys and watch for 30 or more seconds while the .NET modules are compiled in the background before the OSD appears and shows your change.
You can bet next month's house payment that these various pieces of vendor junkware consist of stitched-together example code from the hardware vendors and the lowest-bidder offshored developers contributing the glue portions. They don't invest anything beyond what they have to to get the hardware shipped. So, the speed factor is probably just a side effect of the telemetry client being the cheapest possible development HP could do. This sounds like Lenovo's Superfish moment all over again though; you'd think vendors would avoid that even on their cheapest crappiest Best Buy consumer models.
with a Macbook because it kept crashing. She's in college and too far away for me to really troubleshoot it. So she comes home and brings the Toshiba with her so I can troublshoot.
The crashes were caused by all the crapware. Reams and reams of it. This isn't a cheap laptop either, it's a $1200 i7 with 16 gigs of ram and a 7200 rpm drive (albeit no SSD).
I always wondered why the heck folks were banging on about when they said Macs were better/faster/more stable than a PC. But I only use a corporate laptop and I build desktops at home. The few old laptops I have around home run Linux. Do these manufactures not realize just how much damage the crapware does to their brand?
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I have been running Linux on the desktop for 3 years... I don't miss anything. I upgraded from CentOS 6 to 7 recently and from a fresh install, it took 2 hours including my toolchain and epel apps.
On the other hand, I maintain my families Windows machines. Had to reinstall Windows 10 on a laptop this weekend because all the crapware that was slowing it down making it unusable. I swear you have to do this every few years because of crap that accumulates - let alone the crap that comes with a new PC. It took the entire day to re-install Windows and Office - many reboots for reasons I don't know -
Goodbye Sunday
Vendors get paid to install crapware like Norton. Then Norton makes money off of people who don't know any better.
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wow, actually that was only May of this year
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Lenovo settled a massive $3.5 million fine
This is why this sort of thing keeps happening. Massive? Not even close.
Last year, Lenovo's revenue averaged out to $4.9 Million USD PER HOUR. Congraulations, you fined Lenovo less that what they make in one hour.
Linux Mint. I used it on many computers without any problem. Running now on my Dell Precision m4800 (docking station connected to a LG 34" Ultrawide)) and Asus Zenbook 13". Everything is working fine.
I bought my Dell Precision in october 2014 (i7-4940MX, 32GB RAM, SSD, 1TB HDD, ...) and it's running like a brand new computer. It's fast, responsive, ... I'm a software engineer and I'm running a lot of stuff on it : VM, Dockers, Java development, ... I'll never get this performance with Windows installed on it. Not on a 3 years old laptop.
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
Ubuntu would work just fine for what you are describing.