3 ms·

I feel like the only good option at this point when purchasing a prebuilt desktop or a laptop is to nuke the drive and do a clean install of Windows. Seems like

by sq_ 6y ago

I feel like the only good option at this point when purchasing a prebuilt desktop or a laptop is to nuke the drive and do a clean install of Windows. Seems like the only way to ensure that you've killed the crapware and any partitions meant to preserve/reinstall it.

vetrom 6y ago
Sometimes that isn't even enough. Windows for example ships with a feature called the "Windows Platform Binary Table" that will load and run DLLs embedded in a machine's ACPI tables.
- sq_ 6y ago
  Wow. Didn't know that existed. Hard to see what legitimate, user-serving purpose that would serve. Or at least how the good of it's inclusion would outweigh possible harms.
- mycall 6y ago
  Is there software that will enumerate ACPI for DLLs?
  - mkup 6y ago
    You can look for ACPI table(s) called "WPBT" using RWEverything (if you are a Windows user): http://rweverything.com/downloads/RwPortableX64V1.7.zip http://rweverything.com/downloads/RwPortableX64V1.7.zip or look into the following filesystem path in Linux: /sys/firmware/acpi/tables
aabbcc1241 6y ago
If you want to stay clean, nuke the drive and install linux instead
ezoe 6y ago
Only good option is nuke the Windows and use the better OS, like GNU/Linux, FreeBSD or OpenBSD etc.