I bought an All-In-One PC for the kitchen as a new media player, the old laptop with a monitor on top of it and a wireless keyboard and mouse just wasn't up to the job any longer. (The laptop is ten years old, it has a habit of overheating and shutting down, shits itself with multiple Chrome tabs open, and is generally awful. Really painful to use. YouTube has to be watched at 480p as it can't handle 720p.)
Since I figured I needed the least fancy thing going I got one of the cheapest All-In-Ones Curry's had for delivery, £450 for this thing delivered -
https://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/computing ... 8-pdt.htmlGot it unboxed yesterday and set up by about 17:30, when I went to bed at midnight it was still doing Windows Updates.
First thing I had to uninstall was a limited time McAfee 'DEFENCE SUITE' which of course immediately wanted to start doing a full system scan and was bogging the thing down dreadfully. After that it was basically a case of trying to get Windows 10 through about a year's worth of updates including at least one major updgrade (Creator's Update, Fall Update or whatever the fuck they call them.) This fell on its arse more than once as updates conflicted with each other and required extra reboots it wasn't asking for.
Got up this morning and Windows had finally finished updating itself, so I then set about uninstalling all the other SHITE that HP pre-loaded it with. At idle after a reboot, it was sitting at 2.5GB RAM used and the CPU was constantly being utilised to a varying degree of 5-50%. (It's a low-power quad core AMD CPU, pretty much half an XBox One CPU in effect, so it doesn't have a massive amount of grunt.)
On top of that there were shitty games suites loaded that even had their own Windows Services associated with them, an awful media player, and all kinds of other bloatware crap that HP were clearly taking money for to infest their own hardware with.
(There were about 10 pieces of HP's own software to remove as well, absolutely none of which are required for the PC to work properly, and indeed it works BETTER once they're uninstalled.)
By the time I'd finished the idle RAM usage had dropped to 1.2GB, and the CPU would basically sit at 0% to 5% across all four cores.
For a final flourish it seems HP had put a shitty WLAN driver on there, which caused the wireless card to drop internet traffic periodically and then resume after a couple of minutes. I asked Windows to search for something better, it replaced it with an older driver that works perfectly.
Oh yes the keyboard and mouse are the cheapest, nastiest things ever which must have had a budget of about 35p allocated to them. I have reused the old wireless keyboard and mouse from the previous setup to get around that.
With all that done what I've actually been left with is a reasonably useable All-In-One PC, arguably a lot better than you'd expect for the money. But I feel very sorry for anyone who's trying to use one of the things 'as supplied' as I'd say it's scarcely fit for the purpose in its default state.
All that said, if you're comfortable with fettling the thing to a decent state, it's not a bad system for the cash. (Fans inside get quite noisy when it's under load though, so definitely not a quiet room PC.)
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