So the first thing I did (besides close all the garbage software HP preinstalls and telling it all not to run at startup) was install google chrome. Then I searched for something on google, clicked it, and one of those pseudo-search-advertisement-placeholder pages came up instead of what I clicked. This was one of the symptoms I had in my computer before the factory reset, which is making me a little nervous. Is it possible that I downloaded a virus which infected the factory image partition of my hard drive??
Here's a screenshot of what I got:
It's especially confusing to me because the host site seems to be google, and if i refresh the page it loads the one I intended to go to in the first place. What's going on?