f'n software that comes with it, it says it needs an admin to install
Thats more to do with Windows 7 actually, and not HP. I was having that admin issue as well, and not with one distinct program, but several.
In such cases you'll have to right click on the program file (generally an .exe), then click on security, then edit the permissions.
Sometimes what happens is that if you have a user other than admin, a program will default to that user rather than admin on startup, which can be rectified just by assigning permissions to the user.