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Lenovo Software Update Stealthily Installs Adware

Posted by timothy on from the if-goodwill-means-absolutely-nothing-to-you dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A recent Lenovo automatic software update has the great feature of displaying annoying pop-up ads for Lenovo products. What's worse, it appears that many users are unable to turn the advertisement 'feature' off, subjecting them to pop-ups every couple of hours. Gee guys, a note about your 20% off sale in my e-mail wouldn't have bothered me that much, but you really had to pop up over top of my PowerPoint slides? I'm sure that all of my office colleagues will be running to order ThinkPads ..."

3 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Lenovo has officially jumped the shark by religious+freak · · Score: 5, Informative

    The last thing Lenovo wanted to happen is to dilute the Thinkpad brand and screw up a good thing, when they purchased thinkpad from IBM. Knowing this, I bought a Thinkpad, and the thing totally blows, their customer service is bad and they install way too much crapware on the PC by default (even more than the average manufacturer). Way to go guys...

    --
    If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
  2. Re:No kidding! by Skuld-Chan · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you uninstall "message center plus" it fixes it.

  3. Re:No kidding! by Snowblindeye · · Score: 4, Informative

    I finally figured out what app was causing it and disabled it in msconfig. I can't remember what it was right now, but when I get home I will reply to this with the name of the app to disable.

    According to the article its called Message Center Plus. Here's uninstall instructions from the linked thread:

    Just go to control panel and uninstall [Message Center] in add/remove programs.
    Next time you use System Update when it tries to reinstall Message Center Plus, click on the plus sign and instead of selecting it in the enlarged menu choose hide the update. Then you won't see it next time you run System Update. Of course if Lenovo brings out new releases of Message Center Plus you will have to hide them too.

    And here, also from the thread, instructions to disable it without uninstalling:

    start-->runs-->type msconfig--->go to menue tab --> startup ---> in the list of startup items--->
    unhook
    [ ] MCPLaunch
    &
    [ ] Scheduler_proxy
    -->apply--> ok then a restart is required--> system
    after restart
    -->set in the upcoming message a hook , so that it next time didnt comes up..