BT HomeHub madness!

The new BT Homehub (their aDSL WiFi router) comes in a very sleek black, but apart from that seems to be the same gadget they've been hawking for a couple of years now. Anyway - I was visiting with Sarah's folks this weekend when her Dad mentioned how slow his Windows XP machine had got (three year-old Dell which I routinely remote desktop into to check-out - make sure his AV is up to date and Windows updat has run etc.). So - I fired it up and it crawled for the first ten minutes and then perked up. A quick run of MSCONFIG.EXE revealed a few start-up services that were taking an age to launch and (hiding inside svchost.exe) they turned out to be FOUR (yes, count 'em!) processes that the BT Homehub2 CD installs.

Now then, this is an ethernet-connected router - the only software you need to configure the router is a web browser but this had piled on a load of crap-ware. It reminded me of the state the machine was in when Dell shipped it! I got rid of all the BT stuff and the machine was back to it's nippy self without any trouble from the router.