When I got this laptop (HP Pavilion) it came with Win 10 installed. Although I’d heard many negative things about Win 10 but what the hey, at least give it a chance. Actually it wasn’t the negative experience I thought it would be, at least after I’d removed a lot of bloatware that came with it. Somewhere I’d found or patched together a Powershell script to delete bits and pieces I didn’t want and I didn’t even mind the experience of MS’s pre-Chromium Edge browser. Different and not chrome.
Now also with this laptop also came an HP programme “HP Support Assistant“. Probably more akin to HTA’s I used to write in the early 2000’s for IE actually. It always opened my default browser to an HP page showing various messages, diagnostic tools and computer / driver updates. It sits on my Taskbar and occasionally sets a flag showing me how many messages there are (I have been ignoring).
Well today I opened it to check on a new new message and guess what? If you read the title you win today’s prize…
You guessed right and your prize is <sarcasm> “in the mail” </sarcasm>!
Yes Microsoft in it’s infinite wisdom has thought for me and pre-empted my opening this location in my default browser, which you all know by now is something far more useful as a browser, Vivaldi and is telling me how much better off I’d be opening this site with their browser. Hah !!
Yesterday I wrote about the time lost to Microsoft Updates on my WordPress site and just one day later I have another complaint.
I am sure this Hijacking by Microsoft contravenes many anti-monopoly laws worldwide, possibly (probably) even here in Canada.
P.S.
So far this has only happened with this particular application, actually a ‘Shortcut’ or .lnk file. There is probably not much I can do about it but rant as these files are controlled by the System.
I am just waiting for Microsoft to do more thinking for me and telling me to use Edge…
