[PC Advice] Reinstall Vista On New HP PC?

[gkarris]

I've decided to ask here, since you Mac gurus are much more polite about using Windows, then say, trying to get advice on a PC site.

Well, starting to venture into the land of Vista.

My friend just bought for his home business an HP with Vista on it (basic - wanted to keep it simple). I gladly configured it for him (getting rid of that old Dell )

Should I just try to take the "bloatware" off of it, or try to reinstall from a Vista Basic disc and go from there?

I would think you'd have better chances with a clean system reset.

How would I get a Vista Basic disc? I assume the discs that come with the HP will put all the "bloatware" back on...

Thanks...

 

[tersono]

I'd leave the existing OS on it (although Vista basic is kinda low-rent, but there ya go) and just uninstall the crap - it's really not worth all the effort to re-install from scratch (speaking as someone who has installed/configured 15 Dell PCs in the last week.....).

Once you've gotten rid of the crapware, it should run just fine - you won't get any performance benefit from starting from scratch.

 

[gkarris]

^^^

Thanks! Saves me a lot of work.

Went with Vista Basic because all we need running is Office and QuickBooks Pro...

 

[stainlessliquid]

It only take 15-20 minutes to reinstall Vista from the retail disc. Its not like XP where it takes almost an hour. If you have nothing else to install afterwards then that is much faster.

 

[gkarris]

I'd leave the existing OS on it (although Vista basic is kinda low-rent, but there ya go) and just uninstall the crap - it's really not worth all the effort to re-install from scratch (speaking as someone who has installed/configured 15 Dell PCs in the last week.....).

Once you've gotten rid of the crapware, it should run just fine - you won't get any performance benefit from starting from scratch.

This was of utmost important advice.

Actually, there wasn't much crapware on it.

The last HP I got was an XP laptop for the Senior Pastor at church - that must of had about 30 crapware programs on it.

This HP Vista Desktop only had a few things on it - 1 from Muvee and the other 2 things some sort of HP game package and some other photo editor.

I guess there's not much Vista compatible crapware right now....

Now, when I'm back at my friend's house, to start putting some real programs on it...

 

[ryannel2003]

I re-installed Vista Basic on my Compaq laptop, and what an improvement. I also added RAM to the paltry 512MB and now it's average. But I would definitely do a clean install, makes thing run much smoother. Good luck.

 

[gkarris]

Hey all.

Just got back from my friend's house.

Everything went great. At least he had the latest versions of programs that were all Vista compatible, and it's been out long enough that his printers and scanners had drivers also.

Everything loaded great!

I'm thinking of throwing Vista Basic on my MacBook when I get it.

Definitely Vista Basic or Business is the way to go. Everyone I know that has Home Premium has to keep reloading it, and everyone else I know that has Ultimate, unless they have a very new higher end machine, has problems.

Thanks for the advice all!

Weird - I get better advice on Windows from an Apple site than a PC site.