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8 months agoI am obligated by my work to offer this to customers when they buy an HP printer and I make it really clear that it’s a bad deal for most customers. There are some edge case examples, like a lady with a small business who always prints exactly like 3 pages a day. The other customers who agree to buy it are almost always the super old people who don’t want to have to come to the store to get more ink. I think it’s a shit program that should be scrapped entirely, but some people really don’t care if it’s a bad deal as long as they get the convenience. No different than 7-11 up charging shit because it’s easier to buy it at the market down the street than the Walmart a few miles down the road.
It does come pre-installed on some computers depending on the provided OS and the changes made by the manufacturer. If you install your own fresh version of windows, it should only be installed if windows believes you need it for the component to function.
My last pre-built came with a bunch of garbage before I wiped it with a fresh copy of windows and almost all went away. I would certainly not say Intel is the worst though, older dell machines and even relatively modern HP machines come with a bunch of “necessarily for the component to function” garbage that can’t really be uninstalled easily (windows will reinstall them).