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Crap that came with my computer, part two
May. 11th, 2012 06:44 pmSo most of the remaining crap on my computer has been unobtrusive enough that I've been ignoring it. The main exception was Norton antivirus, which wanted me to buy a license and has now been replaced with AVG free. Even if I were inclined to pay for more protection, it wouldn't be from Norton, because I wanted to see if its firewall had blocked something last month and I couldn't find any advanced settings. Boo.
Norton's online backup thing has also been bugging me, but I just keep clicking "Remind me later." I'll endeavor to care about it at some point.
And something called the HP Support Assistant kept bugging me to schedule a "tune-up." Which I kept clicking no on, because it sounds exactly like a sketchy popup ad for a registry cleaner, and those things are bad news.
So when I got home from work today, the HP Support Assistant told me a restart was required. "Hold on," I thought, "the only way a restart could be required is if you fucked with my system automatically." The internet mostly had people complaining about this thing. Unfortunately, the only thing the Support Assistant would do until I restarted was complain that a restart is required. So I restarted, and went looking to figure out what Support Assistant actually did.
The first thing the internet told me was that I might need the thing installed if I ever actually have to call support, so I guess I'll likely turn it off rather than uninstalling it.
The documentation tends toward vague and non-technical, but there is a list of things the "tune-up" does:
- Sets a restore point. Ok, this might actually be useful, though I wish it actually said up front "set a restore point" rather than "tune-up."
- Performs a hard disk cleanup and repair. This is pretty vague. I'd be happier with this if there was any clue as to what it actually does and why.
- Deletes temporary internet files. Happily, I use Firefox, so I don't think I need this. I suppose it's not hurting anything, though.
- Defragment the hard drive. One of the lovely things about no longer running Windows 98 is not having to defragment the hard drive. But the internet says that doing it regularly can improve performance, so I guess this can stay on.
Huh. That's actually not too bad. But none of it sounds like it would require a restart.
The docs also say that tune-up will show a list of available updates/actions and tips after it runs. But it doesn't say that any of them will be done automatically. It also doesn't say what kinds of actions the actions might be, or where they or the updates come from. I don't like that.
But what's this? A brief look through the (horribly non-standard UI of the) Support Assistant itself reveals that it's never run a tune-up. Which is good, because I've never asked it to, though I suppose I might schedule one now. But then why did Support Assistant insist that I needed to restart?
Did it install some update without asking me? Did it detect some issue, but decline to tell me what it was? It can't have been Windows Update related, because Windows Update tells me that the last time it installed an update was four days ago.
I give up. I am forced to assume that the main purpose of HP Support Assistant is to make me restart my computer for absolutely no reason whenever HP feels like it. Which is too bad, because if it instead did what the docs claim, it might be useful.
Well, except for the "Learn" section. I assume that's all about how to open a browser or something.
