I've just bought an HP Probook 4520s from PB Tech off advice from a friend who said he was really enjoying his. The specs and the price were great for what I wanted. However when I got home I was pretty surprised by a few things when I started it up.

Firstly, what's with all this random software it's come pre-installed with? This whole "HP Total Care" system is starting to annoy me. Is it actually needed? I see that it's taking care of some drivers of some sort but other than that all it seems to be doing is taking up time and space. There's also a whole load of other random stuff like Total Media Suite, Corel Home Office etc... When I checked task manager it says 86 processes are running! Do I need to keep any of this or am I better off doing a complete format and reinstalling Windows?

My flatmate went and bought the same laptop from the same place the next day, and the first thing he did was install the 64 bit version of Windows. He's adamant that it will improve the performance of the machine but I don't have enough knowledge to make a call on that one. He pointed out that while both machines say they have 4GB of installed RAM, mine says that only 2.86 is usable, his says that 3.6 is. I put this down to his clean install of 64 bit Windows and none of this extra HP software or anything else running.

I'm sorry for the rambling for help that this seems like, I've read the forums for a long time but never had anything to ask before now. I just want to make sure that my laptop's running the best it can. This is all pretty embarrassing considering I'm a computer science student, I intend to take it to a few of my tutors so they can have a look over and recommend anything.

Thanks for taking to time to read this, hope anyone can help!!

Specs:
Intel i5 M 480 @ 2.67GHz
500GB HD
4GB DDR3 RAM
1GB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 6370
Pre-installed Windows 7 Pro