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Comment by gootdude | Hacker News Reader

Lenovo uses Microsoft Windows Platform Binary Table to install bloatware, which gets around any kind of clean install/reset.

Clean install for Windows means nothing when you have shady vendors utilizing this mechanism.

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I would change that last part to say "means nothing when you have shady OS makers building this mechanism."

I mean, come on, Microsoft, what were you thinking? Vendors gonna vend, so you had to know how this "feature" was going to be used.

Microsoft created the feature so you'd actually have driver support when doing the reset. I'm sure we all love resetting a touch screen only machine to find out it has no touch support for the install.

Perhaps this would encourage vendors to actually follow standards for their input devices so they didn't require custom drivers. Win-win!

They could have just put the drivers on the CD like every linux distro ever.

You mean the CD recovery image disk which would ostensibly have all the same bloat/spyware as the PC itself?

No, I mean the official Windows CD (technically two DVD set now). New Windows versions are shipping frequently enough now that it would actually be possible.

Microsoft could maintain specific install mediums for each device, including the drivers necessary, but without allowing vendors to load crapware

What about installing an intermediate linux system?

  1. start with window pre-installed
  2. install any linux distro, fully overwriting the OEM
  3. re-install windows, from microsoft

I'd say just stop at step 2 ;) but I can understand that not everybody can do this (eg: work computer) but want a clean OS.

will this method work to remove such bloatware?

This won't work because the firmware will write a file to your hard drive with the bloatware. It's scary that firmware will modify my filesystem - lots of damage could happen here.

Also, instead of step 2, it would make more sense to boot linux on a usb stick and use dd to erase the hard drive -- this is more complete than installing another OS... but still useless if the firmware is working against you.

In this case Windows will write to your filesystem, not the firmware. Of course there is nothing stopping a firmware from writing to the disk before it loads any OS, but that is true with any OS not just Windows.

It won't work unless you manage to flash the UEFI firmware.

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