in my experience, there's usually a lot more in the list.. pay close attention when installing anything, always do a custom install and uncheck the optional stuff.
for your list:
- Device Access Manager - restrict the ability to copy data onto removable devices. if you don't care for this, remove it. if it's there and i wanted to copy data off your machine, i could easily get around it anyway - so it's more of a false sense of security
- Face Recognition - lock your screensaver, password is your webcam looking at your face. i've beat these with a good quality picture of the owner, and in one test, a twin brother. looks cool, impress your friends or whatever, but not immensely useful.
- Privacy Manager - sign your documents and outlook emails with digital signature certificates - if you would use it, great, but who knows what it'll look like on the receivers side, must they install the same hp software? who knows, not worth it.
- Drive Encryption - might be useful if your machine is stolen, but does noticeably affect performance as things have to be encrypted/decrypted
- HP Protection tools - the suite of programs listed above, among others
- HP 3D DriveGuard - an hp rendition of your hard drive's health - win7 would let you know of any problems anyway, but if you like the whole powerpoint feel of things, go for it. to me, just another icon/program taking up memory
- HP Power Assistant - might be useful, but win7 has more options for controlling power
- HP Wireless Assistant - this might actually be useful enough to keep, but only if you constantly hop wireless networks and move between wired networks. if not, remove it - win7 can manage wireless networks fine enough
