HP fail

Bumsbry · 23 Oct 2010 at 13:29

I have been commisioned to sort out the rents' old PC and naturally its a piece of HP pre-built nastyness.

I have ran the hard recovery but it still takes 5 minutes to boot (even though its a P4 with 512mb ram, I am sure a fresh windows xp should be way faster than this)

Can anyone reccomend some good free tools I can download to clean it out? Add/remove programs is only going to get me so far.

bledd · 23 Oct 2010 at 13:47

What do you mean by hard drive recovery?

Install XP again on there, probably needs a new hard drive and 1gb of ram

Bumsbry · 23 Oct 2010 at 14:09

it has a hp auto recovery, I dont have an XP disk for it. So it installs xp+hp crap. 512 should be fine, I used to have a 512 computer with xp and that was fast 'back in the day'. My rents are definitely still living 'back in the day'

actually come to think of it, I do have a spare 2gb stick lyng around that should fit

CaptainCrash · 23 Oct 2010 at 14:21

Bumsbry said:
it has a hp auto recovery, I dont have an XP disk for it. So it installs xp+hp crap. 512 should be fine, I used to have a 512 computer with xp and that was fast 'back in the day'. My rents are definitely still living 'back in the day'

I don't know if it's just me, but once you've installed all the patches, updates and addons necessary to make XP secure and fully functional, it seems to bloat beyond all recognition in terms of resource usage compared with a bare install. 512MB no longer seems enough, it seems to take 1GB or more to make things run smoothly these days.

The cynic in me suspects that it might be MS sneakily "encouraging" people to upgrade to Seven, but perhaps that's a bit tinfoil-hatted even for me.

SiriusB · 23 Oct 2010 at 14:22

Just uninstall all the HP preinstalled junk. Maybe use Autoruns to stop a few things loading with Windows.

SiriusB · 23 Oct 2010 at 14:23

CaptainCrash said:
The cynic in me suspects that it might be MS sneakily "encouraging" people to upgrade to Seven, but perhaps that's a bit tinfoil-hatted even for me.

Considering how massively popular Windows 7 is, and how many licenses they have sold and how superior it is to Windows XP I doubt they need to gimp a previous OS to encourage more sales.

whitecrook · 23 Oct 2010 at 14:24

Just install ubuntu on it, if it will. Some of these cheapo pcs can't even support accel video etc.