New Laptop coming this week

mercman1969

I have heard that you should seek to remove as much clutter as possible when 1st starting the laptop up

Is this correct and if so is there a step by step guide of what do download and how to do it

It is a HP laptop running windows home premium

SAK45

It should be clutter free. It's brand new..
Most probably will come with a free trial of anti virus. You can use Internet Explorer as your browser or download google chrome, upto you. I would just keep things simple and use what's already installed for you. Remove and download when you are more confident. Just my suggestion.

RussJK

Usually loads of bloatware bundled onto new PCs, depending on who the manufacturer is.

1. PC Decrapifier can make a lot of suggestions of what you can remove:
http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/download

2. Startuplite can make a suggestions for what programs don't need to autostart
http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/startuplite

3. Use Appremover (www.appremover.com) to get rid of all the trial antivirus programs like Mcafee etc, then follow up with the vendor specific removal tools.

4. Revo Uninstaller (which more fully removes products compared to just the standard uninstaller) to uninstall what you don't want (http://download.cnet.com/Revo-Uninstaller/3000-2096_4-10687648.html);

5. Untick autostarts using Sysinternals autoruns (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx), but only things you are certain about.

6. Make sure you download a good free antivirus (or your own paid one if you have subscription) like Avira Antivir Free (set it to block fraudulent programs when it asks), or Avast free.
http://www.avira.com/en/avira-free-antivirus
http://www.avast.com/free-antivirus-download

7. Also stick Malwarebytes Antimalware on there, for manual scans.
http://www.malwarebytes.org/

8. Once you get your computer to a point that you are happy with, then clone the hard drive using something like:
Clonezilla (http://clonezilla.org/)
Redo Backup (http://redobackup.org/)

9. Burn a Windows recovery disk

Then follow Closed's guide to see what you missed, such as services to be trimmed using services.msc: https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/2436849

SAK45

Thanks RussJK very useful information

mercman1969

Russ,

That is an awesome post, many thanks.
Does it need doing in the order you have posted them

KillerWatt

I'd burn the recovery media first, that way if you screw it up when uninstalling the bundled software (some of which may be needed to create the recovery media) you can restore it back to factory.

mercman1969

How do you burn a recovery disc.
Can you back it up to a usb stick

RussJK

Doesn't need to be that exact order, except for things like the antivirus software - best to make sure you've completely removed any antivirus software first before installing a new one.

Can create a recovery disk this way:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Create-a-system-repair-disc

Best to look at the backup sticky, as there are many many ways to do this. Personally I have 1:1 images of all my partitions backed up on two external hard drives, as well as manually keeping more frequent backups of certain folders (pictures, firefox profiles, etc).

KillerWatt

mercman1969 wrote: »

How do you burn a recovery disc.

It normally asks you if you want to create the recovery media as soon as you switch it on.
Failing that, take a look through the start menu.

mercman1969 wrote: »

Can you back it up to a usb stick

Depends on what the software allows.
For instance, the Toshiba that I have allows you to create a 32 bit recovery media that can be spread across 3 DVD's that are 4.7GB in size, 2 DVD's that are 8.5GB in size, or a USB storage device that has at least 16GB of free space.

I didn't need to backup the 64 bit version of Win 7 as that installation media was included as standard.

free4440273

Just be careful though/ u might wanna test out the laptop first / make sure there are no issues with it before removing/ otherwise, their clause is sometimes 'u removed {such and such } and u should not have '/ by all means remove the clutter -- i did with my HP and Sony laptops too//

clinteestwood

Do what RussJK said. Usually they install loads of nonsense onto their machines. One particular culprit are printer 'drivers' which sometimes are 100's of megs in size and very heavy to run. get rid of as much of their propriety crap as you can and also prevent it from starting up at boot to increase boot speed.