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You have to watch out these days even when installing a fresh copy of Windows as I found out recently, since some motherboards coughASUScough have software in the BIOS which can get automatically installed. There's an option that comes up on first boot and I clicked yes thinking it was some drivers, but it was the regular company branded bloatware more or less. Not going to make that mistake again.

Really? That's new. Mind you, I have basically all but stopped using Asus the moment they started catering their brand towards 'gamers' on reddit.

Windows allows the firmware to provide a binary that will be executed on first boot (or maybe every boot? not sure) - ASUS is abusing this feature to make their crapware permanent.

Not new. Windows Update will by default pull and automatically install drivers and software based on hardware IDs. If you try to uninstall it, it might be "self-healing software" (can't actually uninstall, have to delete services, autostarts and files manually and in the right order) but in any case Windows Update will put it back anyway soon until you disable automatic driver updates completely. GP already mentioned ASUS by name, MSI also does this, their boards install some weird very hard to remove "audio improvement software" or something like that.

Fair enough. I suppose I should have said "new to me".

Also, I stopped using MSI when their motherboards weren't properly supporting Piledriver/Steamroller AMD cpus power and thus thermal requirements. At least, on some of the mid-high tier boards. (It said it could handle a 8350. That apparently was a lie.)

>they started catering their brand towards 'gamers' on reddit.

Slap some RGB on things that don't need it and charge an extra 50 bucks, easy money

I had the same experience recently. It's a rootkit installed by the BIOS to inject the crapware.

Immediately returned the ASUS board and got something else. It sucked to tear apart a computer I just built but I don't trust then hardware in my machine now.

Lenovo too.

It's called Windows Platform Binary Table, and lets the firmware provide an EXE for Windows to execute on boot. So even if you install a clean OS, this will run, and there is no mandatory prompt (if it's run through this approach and you see a prompt, then the software that was run was nice enough to ask, it was not Windows asking you to confirm whether that is OK).

Yep, experienced this a few times on their consumer products and even older Thinkpads licensed with Windows 10 Home. It is possible to neuter all (most?) of the bloatware by deleting the associated binaries and wiping all of Lenovo's background processes, but it's still a royal pain-in-the-ass when reinstalling Windows on it. They're easy to shut up with Linux, but my heart weeps for those who insist on using Windows.

> It's called Windows Platform Binary Table

When I was in college it was called a hardware rootkit

Lenovo has a pretty storied history with this sort of thing...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Security_and_privacy_in...

> Wish things have changed in 10 years... apparently it didn't.

We no longer have browser toolbars. I remember a time when I had customers come in with 4, 5, or even 6 different browser toolbars. The Google toolbar, the Yahoo toolbar, the McAfee toolbar, the Because-We-Fucking-Can toolbar, etc. Most laptops came with at least one toolbar pre-installed.

Oh. Totally forgot those IE-era toolbars. Nice improvement to get rid of those.

Haha! I was working IT support for the local municipality back then. One time I had to go into the office of the local orchestra to fix their computer which was "slow". When I turned it on there was a cat or a dog walking around on the screen, IE had at least 5 toolbars, including two porn tool bars and the bookmark menu was full of porn links. A hot mess to say the least. Cleaned it up and removed all junk, malware, spyware, toolbars and "fun" applets. Pretty sure it was back to the same mess a couple of weeks later ...

Toolbars we're a big mistake, but I understand why people thought they might be a good idea. Explorer context menu hooks (i.e. open in VS Code) are really useful, and without the benefit of hindsight those seem similar to toolbars.

Those "few more bucks" end up in the right manager's PnL who gets promoted, though. Nobody at Lenovo leadership cares about Lenovo beyond the next few years; that's the problem.

Would be interesting to develop an executive/managerial compensation structure that functions like a 10-year call option. Maybe it could feel a bit like TV show 'residuals' - even if you leave the company you'd still get a check in the mail for the company's longer term success.

So much of the societal harm of corporate america comes from short term optimization at the expense of long term value. Would be great if businesses recognized this and found a good way to attract talent that thinks in decades rather than quarters.

How many CEOs dump all their stock right after leaving a company?

Maybe you could do a 10 year stock grant that is fully vested regardless of employment, and grant the same amount at the same schedule each year (or more frequently) so number of options is proportional to length of employment?

I think this has generally been true of a lot of American companies for a while now. I would add it's not even "next few years", it's more like "next few quarters". If the CEO can juice the stock price for say, four quarters, he may walk away with several million in the bank and who cares what happens after that?

> I think this has generally been true of a lot of American companies for a while now.

Lenovo isn't even an American company. Wikipedia lists their global headquarters as in Beijing.

ah fair enough, I wondered if I should phrase my comment as a global phenomenon.

Exactly. A lot of boneheaded corporate decisions make a whole lot of sense when you think about the individual manager/exec who would've been empowered to make that call and which metrics might get that manager promoted or fired.

The guy at Facebook who decided to randomly resort your feeds and emphasize a rotating set of "like if you like kittens or hate Obama" posts at the cost of your friend's messages wasn't thinking of the long term success of Facebook. They were clearly aiming to increase "like" clicks on a graph.

The guy who decided to integrate Google+ into YouTube and Chrome and everything else didn't give a shit if YouTube or Chrome or Google succeeded. He cared whether or not Google+ membership/participation went up. Same with whoever made most of the decisions about Google Buzz.

The guy at Sony who decided to put rootkits onto music CDs didn't care whether people liked Sony. He cared about whether he could say that he'd done something to stop piracy, and presumably also had a goal of efficiently damning his soul to Hell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

Being slow and crap is basically what consumers expect in a windows laptop. Which is why they largely moved to mobile or a work provided laptop without the crap ware.

I see this indeed, it is why some older people move almost entirely to an (entry level) iPad and are quite happy. The Windows laptop is something of a necessary evil to them, they use it from time to time but hate it (fear of virusses, nag ware, because they use it very little they always need to spend time updating, confusion because of Windows-S).

> work provided laptop without the crap ware.

Those are usually slow as molasses thanks to mandatory <s>crapware</s> sorry antivirus.

Microsoft is also to blame here to allow these brands make preinstalled Windows so slow. They must be getting a good deal of it to allow this.

Otherwise pure clean install on these machines, Windows is not slow. I mean, not fast, but not that slow either.

Imposing restrictions on OEMs got them in a bunch of trouble in the past, and restrictions like what you're suggesting are actively getting Google in trouble (see the recent fine imposed by India).

Incidentally, this kind of thing is why my personal laptop is a Microsoft Surface, and my personal phone is a Google Pixel.

How does this work? Is it possible to install a fresh copy of Windows on a vendor laptop without a separate, expensive, "boxed" license?

Since Windows licences are tied to the hardware you can reinstall it from almost any Windows installation media and it should automatically activate.

If you happened to buy a machine with an OEM Windows Home license baked into the motherboard and want to install retail Windows 11 Professional, this makes it extremely frustrating because you no longer get the choice of which version of Windows to use during the install process.

You need to add the EI.cfg and PID.cfg [0] files to the installer medium before booting it. Once you have those files present with the correct syntax, it will install the version you want, but I can't imagine a non-tech person being able to figure this out on his own.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...

Couldn't you upgrade after the install?

You can do that too, and it's very easy.

I was mostly concerned with making sure none of the preinstalled Windows Home bloatware would remain after an upgrade. I figured the safest way would be installing Professional right off the bat.

Yes; your laptop should have the Windows license embedded in firmware. If it came with one, that is. You can download the Windows installer directly from MS.

Installing all the drivers needed is on you. They might or might not be downloaded from Windows Update.

In the good old days (XP and before) one would get either media or a tool to create CDs with the machine... The key was stickered at the bottom.

I switched to Linux also for work laptop sometime after that so I wouldn't know when that stopped.

You can install windows 10 for free and leave it like that forever if you can deal with the watermark and non-restrictions like not changing the wallpaper.

Or just find a FOSS KMS and be done with it.

On the laptops I've used with pre-installed Windows (which I reinstalled), the license key was in ACPI table "MSDM". I assume Windows gets it from there automatically. You can extract the license key from Linux with: cat /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM

In general, I think, yes, as long as you're installing the same edition. Usually the license is somehow stored in the firmware.

However, in any case, even with a separate, expensive "boxed" license, Windows helpfully provides a convenient way for the firmware to drop additional useful software (aka crap) onto your fresh clean install. As in, it actively checks whether the firmware would like something executed and if so, executes it without prompting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19800807

> How do manufacturers throw in all the crapware and expect a good user experience and happy customers?

they have two customers:

- the people who pay them for the computers

- the crapware people who pay for the bundling

sometimes the profit from one or the other is unexpected.

for instance, in another area, visio makes more money from the snooping data than the tv sale

> How do manufacturers throw in all the crapware and expect a good user experience and happy customers? Oh of course, they don't care.

Edit: To be clear I'm not defending the companies, they shouldn't put all this crapware on there. I'm just saying most customers won't notice it on a new laptop.

In most cases on new laptops their crapware doesn't make a huge difference, because there is enough CPU headroom. The people who are doing so much that they would notice probably will reinstall fresh Windows anyway.

The problem here was that it was a used laptop.

> The problem here was that it was a used laptop.

How do you know this? I would expect a $500 used lenovo laptop to have decent-enough specs.