HP files which are no longer relevant?

[RobJenk]

Hello. I bought an HP Pavilion some twelve years ago. I was very happy with it, but the hardware itself eventually failed. A local technical firm transferred the HD into an Acer Aspire, and this has worked very well for several years. But now the machine is becoming slow, so I'm trying to remove stuff from the HD. There are still several HP support programs on the HD. They do not have live icons, but just the irrelevant/non-operative icon. Can they be uninstalled? Or might their removal cause some vital programs to cease working?

Thanks in advance.

[WAWood]

@RobJenk 

I wish I could assure you that ALL of the HP stuff can be removed without issue -- but there are LOTS of utilities, and folks that just went ahead and removed them all have come back with issues.

My suggestion is that you use the information below to create an Image Backup of your PC to an external drive or large USB stick.  That way, you can charge through the HP utilities, removing a few at a time, and rebooting -- and if the last removal cycle presents problems, you can RESTORE from the image and start over.

I  know that's tedious, but I don't know another way to do it.

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I personally prefer to use third-party Backup solutions as they tend to be both more flexible and more reliable than any built-in solutions.

Macrium Reflect (MR) provides a FREE version that can be used to image and restore partitions or entire drives.

What I recommend is the following:
1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR) from here: http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx
2) Run MR and choose the option: "Create an image of the partition(s) required to backup and restore Windows" to write a full backup to an external drive or USB stick
3) Use the option to create a boot USB stick or CD

My experience is that MR, when using the High Compression option, typically can compress the saved image file to about 50% of the USED space in the OS partition. This means if you have an 80GB OS partition, and 40GB is used, MR only needs about 20GB to store the image file.

I use this all the time and it typically takes less than 15 minutes to do the image backup and about the same time or less to do a restore.

Plus, MR has the option to Add a Recovery Boot Menu entry. This allows you then to boot into WinRE, and you can then use that to do a restore -- when you can't boot into Windows!

NOW, you have the means to restore a full working system from the external drive or USB stick in only a few minutes.

[RobJenk]

Thanks for these replies. In fact, I did make an image before doing anything, so I'll be ok whatever happens.

One particular problem I have with slowness is, on booting up, the connection to wifi takes five or six minutes. Once connected, things aren't too bad, but, for the life of me, I don't know  why the initial connection is so slow. By the way, I have a Win10 machine and a third laptop (originally Win7 but successfully upgraded to Win10) both of which connect rapidly to the same router.

Any ideas about why the Win7 machine might be so slow connecting?

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

@RobJenk 

We're a bunch of specialists here -- so if you have issues with WiFi, you would do better creating a new thread for that one specifically.  That way, the folks that respond to WiFi issues will see it better.