Cactus Music
So glad you got it to work.
And just add, nothing wrong with HP, my second DAW is an off the self HP. But it has been wiped of the original OS and bloat ware, otherwise I don't think I would use it.  My main DAW I built myself and is still on W8. The HP is actually running smoother and faster.  
 
For a music computer to run without issues you are always best to have a nice clean install of the OS on a nice fast Hard drive.
 
You then only add what you need for music production.
It's become harder to achieve with W10 now being bloat ware by default.
Hardware vendors seem to think we want all that useless stuff and off the self computers need a lot more attention to get them clean. I myself don't like the idea of going in and deleting this and disabling that.... much faster and simpler to just start clean and keep it that way.  I get a lot of years out of these builds and crossing my fingers that these new fangled SSD drives will outlast the old style spinners.

Maybe the best thing to do, if one can, is to go to a computer pro shop and have one custom built.  I don't know if this can be done anymore or if there are any of these shops left.  I had one custom built about 15 years ago. All I had to do was buy my own OS, which at the time was Windows Me.
 
JB

No real need to do this if the HP has good specs. All I'm saying is if it does ( have good specs)  then the only money you need to spend is on a new SSD "C" drive and a new copy of W10. A computer is a computer. HP uses "OK" parts of course you can get better, but generally they sort that out and the boxes run for a long time without issues.
 
I built my last DAW from scratch and it cost me almost $800 using good quality stuff. But then I have had issues with the BIOS since day one. That is over my head. When I was given the W7 HP desktop I didn't even use it for a long time, one day my main DAW was crashing and I just gave up and tried to load everything into the HP, it was sooooo slow to boot so I ordered a SSD drive. I then found I had to buy the OS disk from HP. So I loaded up my cracked version of W7 and then upgraded to W10 for free using the Accessibility trick.  They let me use the original serial number on the side sticker. It's been the best music computer ever and I even keep it on line, something that was against my rules.  

Johnbee58

stratman70
John-ditch Bytefence and try and download again...Bytefence is garbage......
Look it up on the web. You can always download the free version again if you must have it. I imagine all you have is the free version.

Don't even know how the hell it got there.  Oh, BTW, the PC in question isn't a laptop.  It's a desktop.
 
JB

John, according to this https://www.pcrisk.com/removal-guides/9191-bytefence-redirect Bytefence gets installed usually by accident when installing something else.....on the sly if you like, one click too many without noticing what you've done. There's usually some clever wording involved to trick you into doing stuff like this.

Bytefence had hooked into your ip stack. It's absolutely the reason the install didn't work.
 

frragnarsson
Bytefence had hooked into your ip stack. It's absolutely the reason the install didn't work.
 

Could very well be.  I was wondering whether it was that or that I just waited longer than I previously did.

Cactus Music
Hardware vendors seem to think we want all that useless stuff and off the self computers need a lot more attention to get them clean.

Believe it or not, the companies who make that crapware actually pay Dell and HP to shovel their stuff on to their computers. So those systems would cost more if it didn't ship with that stuff on it.
 
The first such system that I encountered was my mother's Vista eMachine, otherwise a heckuva deal, and a computer that, by the way, is still in use over 10 years after she bought it, handed down to a friend of mine who is running Podium Free DAW among other things.
 
But the thing came with so much shovelware, including a trial version of Microsoft Office that was the full Office Suite install, but not fully licensed. Every file association was in place, though, so whenever someone would send my mother a .DOC attachment to open, it would launch in Office and try to activate this Trial license. I finally uninstalled the thing and she bought a copy of Works, and then Open Office finally matured enough for her to be able to get her work done with it. I'm sure that Microsoft gave them a big discount on the Vista licenses in exchange for that spiff.

Great to hear it's working John! I think we were all scratching our heads. Now we all have learned something. The way a forum is supposed to work. Let's hope the new one will be as productive.

I must say that I'm really relieved that it wasn't the shovelware that you guys are talking about.  I was actually quite concerned about that because if you have to jump through that many hoops like taking programs off and even going into the system registry (no WAY I'm messing with that) just to download and install a program I seriously was considering not only ending my association with digital music making but computing in general.  That would be the ultimate in ridiculous!  You shouldn't have to do all of that just to run a damned program!  Musically, it would've been back to the good ol' Fostex 4 track multitrack cassette and Yamaha Rx 17 drum machine for me.  Computing should be getting easier, not harder!
 
JB

Johnbee58
I must say that I'm really relieved that it wasn't the shovelware that you guys are talking about.  I was actually quite concerned about that because if you have to jump through that many hoops like taking programs off and even going into the system registry (no WAY I'm messing with that) just to download and install a program I seriously was considering not only ending my association with digital music making but computing in general.  That would be the ultimate in ridiculous!  You shouldn't have to do all of that just to run a damned program!  Musically, it would've been back to the good ol' Fostex 4 track multitrack cassette and Yamaha Rx 17 drum machine for me.  Computing should be getting easier, not harder!
 
JB

Which is why it makes a lot of sense to have a computer dedicated to music, whether you build it yourself, or have some outfit put together a "bare bones" rig. That's what I did. It came with W7 Pro, and nothing else. I've had to reinstall since then (of course, it's Windows), but it still is only for music. I do my web surfing on a Linux computer. I'm very careful what I allow on my music machine. It stays offline 90% of the time. I run MSE for AV, which is enough given how careful I am with it online. Even so, I had an experience similar to yours. But having a bare bones setup at least minimizes the things that can go wrong.

Back about 17 years ago I went to a local computer shop close to where I lived at the time.  I bought a case, motherboard, & processor (an AMD but I forget the type) and the tech installed the mobo and mounted the processor for me, so all I had to do was move the peripherals from my old PC to the new one.  Then I needed an OS for it.  I got on ebay and found a copy of Windows Me.  It was meant to be a general PC but it was the one I started making digital music with.  I had a Zoom MRS802 8 track digital recorder and eventually learned how to export the raw tracks from that machine to the PC on which I was running the free Kristal Audio Engine on, and did my mixes that way.  Crude, but it was a part of the learning process.  I still listen to those mixes now and then.  Not bad.  Not as good as I'm doing now, but not bad.
 
I'll never forget the day my copy of Win Me arrived in the mail:
September 11, 2001
 
JB