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Comment by davis_m | Hacker News Reader

Not necessarily. Many of the higher end and business models come without spyware of any kind, not just this particular piece of software.

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> Not necessarily. Many of the higher end and business models come without spyware of any kind, not just this particular piece of software.

I like that you said spyware, whether intentionally or not.

Most people call these programs "crapware," "junkware," "bloatware," or third-party pre-installed software. Though generally speaking this third-party junkware isn't expressly designed to be spyware. Nevertheless, with cases like Superfish, the line between spyware and junkware is vanishingly faint.

I've never heard "crapware" "junkware" or "bloatware", definitely not "third party pre installed software".

Everybody, included non technically literate people call this spyware. This is where names like "spybot search and destroy" come from.

I, for one, have heard all of those used. I'm not so sure tech-illiterate people even know what spyware even means.

Yes, when a major company orders 3000+ laptops, they say exactly what they want on them, and that's what they get.

Couple of things here. Large companies most likely reimage the devices with enterprise license. For example, we order based on hardware configuration. Our company uses HP for everything, so we purchase the business class equipment with 3 year warranty on everything. Also, we don't use the version of Windows that comes with the devices, we reimage all our systems with our own using System Center Configuration Manager.

I'm curious, are you concerned with the fact that you can't get HP updates after your warranty is up?

Only updates we may be concerned for are BIOS ones with our full disk encryption compatibility with Check Point. None of our systems have any HP software so we don't need updates for those. We also control updates like java, flash, and windows ones too via SCCM.

I'd wager ChristianBundy was referring to device drivers that would come from HP for things like the graphics card or CPU's built-in graphics processor. Often, these start out as an Intel chip but are then slightly modified by the laptop builder so that the base OEM drivers should no longer be used. Many times, these drivers are not distributed via Windows Update. As such, the drivers wind up out of date, continuing to use what was in the base image... sometimes the generic version included on Windows Update. This can often lead to system instability, particularly where browsers come into play on corporate systems (that's usually the most graphics intensive thing they do). Folks like Mozilla and Google maintain driver blacklists to disable hardware acceleration when one of these outdated and buggy drivers is detected (here's Mozilla's: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drive... ). So, the browser will run a bit slower. More importantly, text won't render anywhere near as well... approaching unreadability on some sites.

In general the big PC makers will have all their hardware drivers available for download, and if you need a specific driver you can just add it to your base image (assuming it's not already handled for you by Windows updates)

It's a lot easier to add HP's drivers to a base image than it is to turn a HP base windows install into something configured the way we want.

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