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Comment by daemin | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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

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