HP Media PC - Shortcomings

The HP Pavilion came with Windows XP Media Edition and a free upgrade to Windows Vista. It also came with a considerable amount of crapware, which is software you don't want, pre-installed. Games, trial versions of software and so on. This unfortunately is very common with consumer brand PCs.

This was one of the first things on my hit list. Normally I would do a clean install of the operating system from the Windows Install disk. Unfortunately the HP didn't come with one. They rely on an image of the operating system on a partition (a separate space "allocated" on the hard drive) which also includes the crapware. The alternative to doing a clean install is to try to uninstall all the crapware however this frequently leaves bits and pieces on the hard drive and in the system registry (systems setting files). The XP Media Edition was a separate DVD than the XP Home DVD also, so that eliminated that option of doing a clean install

The Vista upgrade disk fortunately had an option to do a clean install so this was the approach I would take.

The other two shortcomings were hardware components.

The 320Gb Seagate hard drive was a capable drive but I prefer to have two, separate physical drives; one for the operating system and programs and another for data such as pictures, music, TV recordings etc. I like to create an image of the programs disk so I can easily restore a system if I have a problem and it makes it easier to backup if all the data is on one drive rather than buried in a number of folders all over the place.

To solve this problem, I added a Hitachi 100Gb SATA 2 hard drive to the system. This should be large enough to handle all programs I use. I did a clean install of Windows Vista Home and, voila, a clean system free of crapware! CAVEAT: I own most of the software that I normally use so didn't lose any utility of the pre-installed software. HP's web site also has most of the drivers and lite versions of their pre-install software to download, but do a complete inventory of what is on your hard drive to ensure you don't miss out on anything.

The final problem was the integrated nVidia 6150 video card. Once Windows Vista was installed I ran the Windows Experience Index utility which measures how capable your system is to run Vista. The top score is 5.9 but my poor Pavilion only managed a 3.1. While this was perfectly acceptable for basic media tasks, it might be lacking for more demanding media tasks or playing back hi-def video. The root cause was of course the video card - all the other components were quite respectable. But what to do?

That will be be for another post!