HP Officejet software

I recently purchased an HP Officejet 4580 All-in-one and installed the software from CD, which consisted of 10—yes, 10– resource-hogging programs, including a 308 megabyte (yes, 308 MB!!) program called “HP Customer Participation Program. The HP interface also will not run without Adobe Flash (with Active X), which, in turn, installed NOS Microsystems GetPlus Active X downloader on my computer. I used Errata’s AxBan Kill ActiveX to killbit the ActiveX, and have uninstalled a couple of the obviously superfluous HP programs. Do you think I can safely uninstall the 308 MB Customer Participation Program without any ill effects? Why do vendors like HP load up their products with such huge amounts of garbage, and why do they force customers to install patently dangerous applications that are known to be exploitable? Thanks.

HP are renowned for bogging you down with they're stuff, but you can safely uninstall ANY part of it without any problems, but obviously you need the driver as a minimum, but will probably need the applications for using it so it will be easier going, but you can happily get rid of the bloatware and it will still run fine. Now the active x issue, there is nothing to worry about, Adobe uses it as standard for it's updates, GetPlus is an update manager, so if the download gets cut off it will save a folder on the desktop that you can run to restart the download, they use this due to the large size of the file(s), you can simply uninstall it after the update, but it may be installed again for future downloads, but it's nothing to worry about, hope that helps a bit.

HP are renowned for bogging you down with they're stuff, but you can safely uninstall ANY part of it without any problems, but obviously you need the driver as a minimum, but will probably need the applications for using it so it will be easier going, but you can happily get rid of the bloatware and it will still run fine.

Now the active x issue, there is nothing to worry about, Adobe uses it as standard for it's updates, GetPlus is an update manager, so if the download gets cut off it will save a folder on the desktop that you can run to restart the download, they use this due to the large size of the file(s), you can simply uninstall it after the update, but it may be installed again for future downloads, but it's nothing to worry about, hope that helps a bit.

Thanks for your speedy reply. I'll get rid of that one big app.
Cheers, Ozyank