Just wanted to give you a feed back on HP support assistant. I have owned laptops since the 1980s. Yes, I worked for IBM as well. I have windows 7 on your laptop. HP support assistant disappeared. Yes. I can read. I have gone into downloads, controls, programs, eliminated, tried to reinstall, yatta, yatta and nothing works. You can look inside and see that the modules are supposedly there. However, the guts cannot be accessed. So, having HP support assistant is, to me, a useless concept.
In the real world, there is no privacy.
Companies like Verizon have the capability of taking control of a computer remotely and going in and checking on access problems. Some day, a bright person at HP will also come up with that concept. Until then, consumers will suffer in silence and stop using new and improved capabilities of systems that simply don't work.