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Lenovo Saying Goodbye To Bloatware
An anonymous reader writes: "Lenovo today announced that it has had enough of bloatware. The world's largest PC vendor says that by the time Windows 10 comes out, it will get rid of bloatware from its computer lineups. The announcement comes a week after the company was caught for shipping Superfish adware with its computers. The Chinese PC manufacturer has since released a public apology, Superfish removal tool, and instructions to help out users. At the sidelines, the company also announced that it is giving away 6-month free subscription to McAfee LiveSafe for all Superfish-affected users.
We all win with at least a single computer maker stopping the insane practice of selling their customers instead of selling TO their customers.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Pay them to not fill your brand new machine with crap? Name another market where you do that...
It would be nice to see Lenovo go a step ahead in the consumer market and not just stop with shovelware, but maybe bundle some security features with their products. This would go a long way to fixing their black eye in the press:
1: A TPM chip shipped off and disabled (as per the spec) on all machines would be useful. Windows Vista and newer can take advantage of this and offer solid encryption that is highly resistant to brute force attack.
2: Add clientside encryption to Reachit with a public format, perhaps getting other vendors on board. This way, users have cloud access... but files are transparently encrypted, similar to BoxCryptor.
3: Have a small SSD read-only volume with a custom WIM present for install media as well as drivers. This way, if a machine needs to be reinstalled from scratch due to a HDD or SSD replacement, this can be done anywhere, and no OS media would be needed. This also is useful for recovery as well, especially if there is a way to get to a PE environment which can be used to save off files, run an offline AV scanner, or fix a haywire application.
4: Add firewalling onto the NICs themselves. Around 10 years ago, some nVidia motherboard chipsets had this capability where the onboard NICs were intelligent enough to have the ability to have their own rulesets. This was quite useful, both to keep the OS protected with IP blacklists, as well as to limit the damage a compromised OS can do (for example, block all outgoing port 25 traffic.) As an added benefit, if someone is worried about vPro or other "ring -1" management tools, those can easily be blocked at the NIC.
I've always wondered why manufacturers reinvent the wheel when it comes to bundled utilities. Why does Lenovo develop its own power controls, wireless manager, driver updater, display management, etc when there are standard OS utilities to handle these things? Isn't it sort of a waste of their time? It's always fun when the 3rd party utils start fighting with the native OS tools for control.
I've shopped at a small boutique dealer for years for my desktop PCs, and they pride themselves on excellent quality, customization, and customer service. They'll install Windows, Ubuntu, or even no OS at all, and naturally, no crapware in sight. The QA they put each custom machine through is also impressive, and you can actually watch your machine as it goes through the process.
That sort of quality still exists if you look around a bit, and are willing to pay for it. I haven't done any real price matching, as it's hard to make perfect apples-to-apples comparisons (for instance, other chains often don't tell you the exact motherboard model or what type of power supplies they use), but you do certainly pay considerably more than the typical computers you'd find at Dell or other large chains. Totally worth it to me though.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.