HP (Hewlett Packard) is a very well renowned American company known for quality electronics devices like printers and computers. But recently they are in the news for pushing a software called HP Touchpoint Manager that behaves like a standard spyware. This software collects the user data and then sends it over to HP servers – all this is done without user’s consent.
HP has been installing this software on their client’s computers for about two weeks through automatic updates and many people have complained about it on HP Forums. Some people are noticing soaring CPU usage after this software is installed while others are complaining that it was installed without any information or consent. Computer World has published a detailed article about this problem and how this telemetry software is slowing down people’s computers.
But it is easy to get rid of this software (or as some are calling it, spyware). If you are seeing a sudden spike in the CPU usage of your HP computer followed by an unusually high network activity, then you can follow these steps to get rid of HP Touchpoint Manager:
- Press the hotkey Win+X to open the admin menu in Windows.
- From this menu, select Programs ans Features to open the window that displays all the installed programs.
- Select HP Touchpoint Manager from the list and then click on the Uninstall button in the toolbar.
- After the software is removed, you can reboot your PC and you have got rid of the HP’s telemetry spyware.
Even though both HP and Microsoft have not yet released any explanation about this issue, HP will perhaps make necessary changes to the software and then it won’t harvest so much data from the client’s computers or it will seek the consent first from the users before installing or updating it.