Microsoft is reportedly auto-installing the HP Smart app on Windows 10 and 11 PCs
Microsoft is reportedly auto-installing the HP Smart app on Windows 10 and 11 PCs
Users say that the HP Smart app is being automatically installed on Windows 10 and Windows 11 PCs. Here's what's happening.
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Never use anything hp branded if you can help it
To be fair, as someone who also works with hardware on an enterprise level, HP enterprise hardware is good and (yeah, this will sound weird) repair-friendly.
But on a consumer-level should be avoided like the plague!
That’s HPE though. To my knowledge they’re two completely seperate companies.
That basically indicates where they get their money between both groups. Enterprise, from hardware sales and support programs. However, consumer side is basically just harvesting personal information and selling it
In one of my previous roles as a sysadmin, our company signed a deal with HP to directly supply enterprise laptops to one of our clients as part of Microsoft's Autopilot deployment model, so users could get a new/replacement laptops directly and get it customized on the fly at first logon, instead of us having to manually build it the traditional way and ship it out. It worked fine in our pilot testing, so we decided to roll out to the wider audience.
However, one problem which arose after the wider rollout, was that SCCM wasn't able to connect to any of these machines (we had it in co-management mode), and even the laptops which were able to communicate previously, stopped communicating. It was working fine in our pilot phase, but something was now blocking the traffic to SCCM and we couldn't figure it out - it was all okay on the network/firewall side, so we thought it could be a configuration issue on the SCCM server side so we raised a priority ticket with MS. After some investigation, we found the root cause - turned out out to be this nasty app called HP Wolf Security - which was new at the time - which HP started tacking on to all devices, unbeknownst to us. Wolf was supposed to be an "endpoint protection" solution - which no one asked for, especially since we already had Defender. Searched online and found tons of similar issues reported by other users, all caused by Wolf. Lost some of my respect for HP since then - who tf pulls stunts like this on an enterprise level?!
Yeah, I really like the hardware of ProBook/EliteBook but the software is atrocious when used with the default Image.
For Small Companies, I kinda like Wolf Security, as it has some nice sandbox features, but for medium-size companies where you already have an security endpoint, I think it’s more of an issue.
Got an HPE Aruba switch, it's the only HP thing I've ever had that I like. Getting new firmware from HP was a pita though.
the HPE sites are a fucking nightmare
I do like the HPE hardware and support but fuck the management that controls their web presence.
Its not very good even for enterprise level, you still have to reinstall whole OS and run debloaters to delete hp spyware. A lot of pointless extra work for something you should be able to just hand out or do basic configurations.
Maybe its good if you consider purely the hardware, but even then it propably has at least some way for hp to gather information no matter what you do to it. I wonder if anyone has thoroughly investigated what kind of stuff corporations put into stuff they sell.
you still have to reinstall whole OS and run debloaters to delete hp spyware. A lot of pointless extra work
15 year sysadmin and I've never worked anywhere or heard of an org that uses the pre-installed OS, and that's independent of manufacturer and OS.
Yes, I was talking from an hardware perspective. Most companies where I have been don’t deploy the pre-installed image, since it has a ton of bloatware!
I told my girlfriend (now wife) when we moved in together that i had over rule: you're not allowed to purchase anything HP. May the company burn in hell.
Make messes, leave food sitting out, invite shady people over...just for God's sake don't bring an HP product into my home!
Never use anything Microsoft if you can help it
I just wish one could help it. At work I mostly curse microsoft but at least they have some useful stuff. But nothing that is worth all the shit if there was any option. Its also quite blatant how they change their services to be dumber and more annoying to use most likely only to later start selling some premium version of it that is less painful to use.