I just spend the past week or so in a failed attempt to get my Dad set up with his new HP desktop running Windows 8.

I eliminated much of the initial "bloatware" as well as Norton Semantic in favor of Malware Bytes (admittedly a close call) and set up some automatic tasks for maintenance which would otherwise not occur to him to run.

He subsequently upgraded to 8.1 without telling me first, and somewhere along the line things went downhill fast! Although his applications still worked, most of the normal "system stuff" was acting corrupted.  The first symptom was that the Control Panel was taking four minutes (!) to start!  Worse, most if not all of the other system tools I tried to use were either broken or compromised ("process had to stop").

The more I tried to fix the environment (including using MB, SAS and AIO) the worse it seemed to get. Soon,  I couldn't (a) Invoke the Control Panel, or (b) Connect Remotely, or (c) Update windows (d) use System Restore or even (e) use System Repair.  I finally threw my hands up and purchased some limited HP support.

Interestingly, their first observation was that their own "house brand" diagnostic tool (HPSA.exe) was "a" (if not "the") root cause of these problems!  According to the HP tech, this process "has its tentacles into everything" and has the potential to put a serious "hurt" on the OS.

I have seen this process many times on my own HP machines, but only under Windows 7.  On my Dad's Windows 8.1 machine, this HPSA process would pop up now and again only to declare that it needed to quit.  Based on my Windows 7 experience I wasn't surprised.  Since I'd never known it to actually "solve" any problem on my machines, I had come to regard it as "toothless" nuisance and told my Dad to just ignore it.  So imagine my surprise when the HP tech said it might have "gone over to the dark side"!

We're still awaiting the final verdict on this, but I'll admit I was seriously shaken by the whole experience, in part because I'm the most computer literate person in my family and it was beginning to look like I couldn't do anything right!  Oh, and I want those four days of my life back!