Solved HP Pavilion Laptop Win 11 Reinstall

Greetings. I have a 2023 HP 15t-eg200 laptop that came with Windows 11. I also have Office 2021 installed. It was working fine until a week or two ago and when I turned it on it was not connected to my router. Oddly there were no network connections available and the network settings page indicated no network adaptor present. Device manager showed no network adaptor and also unknown USB device with no hardware ID. I tried downloading the appropriate drivers from HP support site and no joy. No sure if it was a WU issue but apparently this is a common problem with HP laptops.

At this point I decided to do a fresh install using Windows MCT and latest version of Windows 11 downloaded from MS. I selected English World region during install to avoid all the crapware. Install went just fine using OOBE\BYPASSNRO to use a local account. After install, Windows Update installed multiple updates including a BIOS update. Everything seems to be working great. Device manager shows all devices working fine. I no longer have any HP software or bloatware. My question is do I need any of the HP software and is any of it desirable or recommended or is Win11 fine without it? Thank you.

bfunke said:

I no longer have any HP software or bloatware. My question is do I need any of the HP software and is any of it desirable or recommended or is Win11 fine without it?

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You should be fine without it, but if you really want to you should be able to install anything you feel would be useful from you PC's HP Support page. Chances are that there will be little (if any) that you need.

I am not familiar with the HP software/bloatware, but for my Dell machines the first thing I did on receiving them was a clean install. I don't feel any need for the vast majority of the Dell bloatware. I still get regular Dell bios updates and Dell-specific driver updates through Windows Update.

I have just the two Dell apps installed. The first was the Dell Touchpad Assistant which was automatically installed for me by Windows Update. The second I installed myself from the Dell Support pages, The Dell Power Manager. This was not really an essential, but it does give me control over the battery charging settings that without it I could only set by going into the BIOS.

Open device manager. Is there any yellow alerts of missing drivers?

A laptop most of the time has proprietary hardware that requires special drivers or some specific applications.
For example
- Keyboard
- Touch pad
- Charge control

Thanks Bree - As far as I can determine the HP Pavilion series does not have a HP battery manager.
Megahertz - No alerts or flags of any sort in Device Manager. Everything seems to have a working driver. I think Windows has gotten much better identifying drivers out of the box.

bfunke said:

Everything seems to have a working driver. I think Windows has gotten much better identifying drivers out of the box.

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You may find, as I did, that Windows Update will find and install some specific OEM apps and/or utilities. If not automatically, you may well see then in Windows Update > Advanced options > Optional updates, that's where all my Dell bios firmware updates have appeared.

The printer manufacturers are all now going with apps from the MS store rather than full featured program installations that allow the user to use any of the additional functions of his printer directly from his desktop. such as scan to PC, fax, etc.
For HP, it's the HP Smart app.

Thanks Glasskuter. I have old HP 8600 AIO printer and while Smart can print and scan, I find the old HP software package seems to be easier to use than Smart App.

Thanks all. My laptop seems to be running at least as well with a fresh install than it did out of the box so I'm marking this thread solved.