> As an aside, Microsoft fought in court to force OEMs to not install this crap alongside Windows (reasonably since it was damaging their brand and making the machines less secure), but they lost.

One of the greatest losses from the retail Microsoft Store shutdown was the loss of Microsoft's "Signature Edition" PC program. They only sold in their Stores PCs with clean Windows installs, which they labeled "Signature Edition". Many of the OEMS participated (Dell, Lenovo, others), and generally when you could directly compare Signature Edition models to their regular direct from the OEM counterparts (which the companies model naming/numbering schemes often intentionally tried to make hard to do) it was often about a $50 premium over the "full of junk installed" PC (showing about how much all that bloatware is valuable to the OEMs if it subsidizes machines by about $50).

For a brief period it even looked like other retailers might adopt Signature Edition sales and you could even walk into a Staples or a Best Buy and find sales people that could source Signature Edition machines, for the people that still liked to try to deal shop between multiple retail stores.

I miss being able to give the advice "buy whatever computer you want from Microsoft Store, or if you go to Staples/Best Buy keep asking sales people until you meet the person that knows what Signature Edition means and you generally won't have any problems with the machine".

Now the advice is back to "buy a Surface from Microsoft or be prepared to spend a couple hours using the Windows Fresh Start tool from Microsoft first".