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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.
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.