8 ms·

I don't get it. For a few more bucks they instantly get their brand connonated with slowness and being unreliable. How do manufacturers throw in all the crapwa

I don't get it. For a few more bucks they instantly get their brand connonated with slowness and being unreliable. How do manufacturers throw in all the crapware and expect a good user experience and happy customers? Oh of course, they don't care. I've moved to Mac but back in days I used Windows, the VERY FIRST thing I did was to install a fresh copy of Windows, then install any necessary drivers which are absolutely required for proper function (I remember just finding the driver files and installing them manually from add hardware dialog instead of installing bloatware of the manufacturer). Wish things have changed in 10 years... apparently it didn't. And of course I'm tech savvy. I don't see any less-savvy senior being able to solve this problem; it should be regulated in a way that there should be a mandatory and ugly label showing all the crapware included with the device while buying, perhaps even extra taxing for each crapware included, discouraging manufacturers from including them.

m463 4y ago
> How do manufacturers throw in all the crapware and expect a good user experience and happy customers? they have two customers: - the people who pay them for the computers - the crapware people who pay for the bundling sometimes the profit from one or the other is unexpected. for instance, in another area, visio makes more money from the snooping data than the tv sale
praptak 4y ago
How does this work? Is it possible to install a fresh copy of Windows on a vendor laptop without a separate, expensive, "boxed" license?
- vetinari 4y ago
  Yes; your laptop should have the Windows license embedded in firmware. If it came with one, that is. You can download the Windows installer directly from MS. Installing all the drivers needed is on you. They might or might not be downloaded from Windows Update.
- daemin 4y ago
  Since Windows licences are tied to the hardware you can reinstall it from almost any Windows installation media and it should automatically activate.
  - jimpudar 4y ago
    If you happened to buy a machine with an OEM Windows Home license baked into the motherboard and want to install retail Windows 11 Professional, this makes it extremely frustrating because you no longer get the choice of which version of Windows to use during the install process. You need to add the EI.cfg and PID.cfg [0] files to the installer medium before booting it. Once you have those files present with the correct syntax, it will install the version you want, but I can't imagine a non-tech person being able to figure this out on his own. [0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/windows-setup-edition-configuration-and-product-id-files--eicfg-and-pidtxt?view=windows-11 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...
    - lmz 4y ago
      Couldn't you upgrade after the install?
      - Scharkenberg 4y ago
        You can do that too, and it's very easy.
        jimpudar 4y ago
        I was mostly concerned with making sure none of the preinstalled Windows Home bloatware would remain after an upgrade. I figured the safest way would be installing Professional right off the bat.
- silon42 4y ago
  In the good old days (XP and before) one would get either media or a tool to create CDs with the machine... The key was stickered at the bottom. I switched to Linux also for work laptop sometime after that so I wouldn't know when that stopped.
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  You can install windows 10 for free and leave it like that forever if you can deal with the watermark and non-restrictions like not changing the wallpaper.
  - cauefcr 4y ago
    Or just find a FOSS KMS and be done with it.
- matja 4y ago
  On the laptops I've used with pre-installed Windows (which I reinstalled), the license key was in ACPI table "MSDM". I assume Windows gets it from there automatically. You can extract the license key from Linux with: cat /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
  In general, I think, yes, as long as you're installing the same edition. Usually the license is somehow stored in the firmware. However, in any case, even with a separate, expensive "boxed" license, Windows helpfully provides a convenient way for the firmware to drop additional useful software (aka crap) onto your fresh clean install. As in, it actively checks whether the firmware would like something executed and if so, executes it without prompting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19800807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19800807
daemin 4y ago
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.
- Manu40 4y ago
  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.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    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.
  - formerly_proven 4y ago
    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.
    - Manu40 4y ago
      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.)
  - 4y ago
Gigachad 4y ago
Being slow and crap is basically what consumers expect in a windows laptop. Which is why they largely moved to mobile or a work provided laptop without the crap ware.
- teekert 4y ago
  I see this indeed, it is why some older people move almost entirely to an (entry level) iPad and are quite happy. The Windows laptop is something of a necessary evil to them, they use it from time to time but hate it (fear of virusses, nag ware, because they use it very little they always need to spend time updating, confusion because of Windows-S).
- oefrha 4y ago
  > work provided laptop without the crap ware. Those are usually slow as molasses thanks to mandatory <s>crapware</s> sorry antivirus.
- can16358p 4y ago
  Microsoft is also to blame here to allow these brands make preinstalled Windows so slow. They must be getting a good deal of it to allow this. Otherwise pure clean install on these machines, Windows is not slow. I mean, not fast, but not that slow either.
  - delecti 4y ago
    Imposing restrictions on OEMs got them in a bunch of trouble in the past, and restrictions like what you're suggesting are actively getting Google in trouble (see the recent fine imposed by India). Incidentally, this kind of thing is why my personal laptop is a Microsoft Surface, and my personal phone is a Google Pixel.
club_tropical 4y ago
Those "few more bucks" end up in the right manager's PnL who gets promoted, though. Nobody at Lenovo leadership cares about Lenovo beyond the next few years; that's the problem.
- cwkoss 4y ago
  Would be interesting to develop an executive/managerial compensation structure that functions like a 10-year call option. Maybe it could feel a bit like TV show 'residuals' - even if you leave the company you'd still get a check in the mail for the company's longer term success. So much of the societal harm of corporate america comes from short term optimization at the expense of long term value. Would be great if businesses recognized this and found a good way to attract talent that thinks in decades rather than quarters. How many CEOs dump all their stock right after leaving a company?
  - cwkoss 4y ago
    Maybe you could do a 10 year stock grant that is fully vested regardless of employment, and grant the same amount at the same schedule each year (or more frequently) so number of options is proportional to length of employment?
- susanasj 4y ago
  I think this has generally been true of a lot of American companies for a while now. I would add it's not even "next few years", it's more like "next few quarters". If the CEO can juice the stock price for say, four quarters, he may walk away with several million in the bank and who cares what happens after that?
  - jldugger 4y ago
    > I think this has generally been true of a lot of American companies for a while now. Lenovo isn't even an American company. Wikipedia lists their global headquarters as in Beijing.
    - 4y ago
Beltalowda 4y ago
> Wish things have changed in 10 years... apparently it didn't. We no longer have browser toolbars. I remember a time when I had customers come in with 4, 5, or even 6 different browser toolbars. The Google toolbar, the Yahoo toolbar, the McAfee toolbar, the Because-We-Fucking-Can toolbar, etc. Most laptops came with at least one toolbar pre-installed.
- can16358p 4y ago
  Oh. Totally forgot those IE-era toolbars. Nice improvement to get rid of those.
  - Thlom 4y ago
    Haha! I was working IT support for the local municipality back then. One time I had to go into the office of the local orchestra to fix their computer which was "slow". When I turned it on there was a cat or a dog walking around on the screen, IE had at least 5 toolbars, including two porn tool bars and the bookmark menu was full of porn links. A hot mess to say the least. Cleaned it up and removed all junk, malware, spyware, toolbars and "fun" applets. Pretty sure it was back to the same mess a couple of weeks later ...
- slaymaker1907 4y ago
  Toolbars we're a big mistake, but I understand why people thought they might be a good idea. Explorer context menu hooks (i.e. open in VS Code) are really useful, and without the benefit of hindsight those seem similar to toolbars.
jedberg 4y ago
> How do manufacturers throw in all the crapware and expect a good user experience and happy customers? Oh of course, they don't care. Edit: To be clear I'm not defending the companies, they shouldn't put all this crapware on there. I'm just saying most customers won't notice it on a new laptop. In most cases on new laptops their crapware doesn't make a huge difference, because there is enough CPU headroom. The people who are doing so much that they would notice probably will reinstall fresh Windows anyway. The problem here was that it was a used laptop.
- sparrc 4y ago
  > The problem here was that it was a used laptop. How do you know this? I would expect a $500 used lenovo laptop to have decent-enough specs.

m463 4y ago

> How do manufacturers throw in all the crapware and expect a good user experience and happy customers? they have two customers: - the people who pay them for the computers - the crapware people who pay for the bundling sometimes the profit from one or the other is unexpected. for instance, in another area, visio makes more money from the snooping data than the tv sale

praptak 4y ago

How does this work? Is it possible to install a fresh copy of Windows on a vendor laptop without a separate, expensive, "boxed" license?

vetinari 4y ago
Yes; your laptop should have the Windows license embedded in firmware. If it came with one, that is. You can download the Windows installer directly from MS. Installing all the drivers needed is on you. They might or might not be downloaded from Windows Update.
daemin 4y ago
Since Windows licences are tied to the hardware you can reinstall it from almost any Windows installation media and it should automatically activate.
- jimpudar 4y ago
  If you happened to buy a machine with an OEM Windows Home license baked into the motherboard and want to install retail Windows 11 Professional, this makes it extremely frustrating because you no longer get the choice of which version of Windows to use during the install process. You need to add the EI.cfg and PID.cfg [0] files to the installer medium before booting it. Once you have those files present with the correct syntax, it will install the version you want, but I can't imagine a non-tech person being able to figure this out on his own. [0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/windows-setup-edition-configuration-and-product-id-files--eicfg-and-pidtxt?view=windows-11 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...
  - lmz 4y ago
    Couldn't you upgrade after the install?
    - Scharkenberg 4y ago
      You can do that too, and it's very easy.
      - jimpudar 4y ago
        I was mostly concerned with making sure none of the preinstalled Windows Home bloatware would remain after an upgrade. I figured the safest way would be installing Professional right off the bat.
silon42 4y ago
In the good old days (XP and before) one would get either media or a tool to create CDs with the machine... The key was stickered at the bottom. I switched to Linux also for work laptop sometime after that so I wouldn't know when that stopped.
Traubenfuchs 4y ago
You can install windows 10 for free and leave it like that forever if you can deal with the watermark and non-restrictions like not changing the wallpaper.
- cauefcr 4y ago
  Or just find a FOSS KMS and be done with it.
matja 4y ago
On the laptops I've used with pre-installed Windows (which I reinstalled), the license key was in ACPI table "MSDM". I assume Windows gets it from there automatically. You can extract the license key from Linux with: cat /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM
tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
In general, I think, yes, as long as you're installing the same edition. Usually the license is somehow stored in the firmware. However, in any case, even with a separate, expensive "boxed" license, Windows helpfully provides a convenient way for the firmware to drop additional useful software (aka crap) onto your fresh clean install. As in, it actively checks whether the firmware would like something executed and if so, executes it without prompting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19800807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19800807

daemin 4y ago

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.

Manu40 4y ago
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.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  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.
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  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.
  - Manu40 4y ago
    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.)
- 4y ago

Gigachad 4y ago

Being slow and crap is basically what consumers expect in a windows laptop. Which is why they largely moved to mobile or a work provided laptop without the crap ware.

teekert 4y ago
I see this indeed, it is why some older people move almost entirely to an (entry level) iPad and are quite happy. The Windows laptop is something of a necessary evil to them, they use it from time to time but hate it (fear of virusses, nag ware, because they use it very little they always need to spend time updating, confusion because of Windows-S).
oefrha 4y ago
> work provided laptop without the crap ware. Those are usually slow as molasses thanks to mandatory <s>crapware</s> sorry antivirus.
can16358p 4y ago
Microsoft is also to blame here to allow these brands make preinstalled Windows so slow. They must be getting a good deal of it to allow this. Otherwise pure clean install on these machines, Windows is not slow. I mean, not fast, but not that slow either.
- delecti 4y ago
  Imposing restrictions on OEMs got them in a bunch of trouble in the past, and restrictions like what you're suggesting are actively getting Google in trouble (see the recent fine imposed by India). Incidentally, this kind of thing is why my personal laptop is a Microsoft Surface, and my personal phone is a Google Pixel.

club_tropical 4y ago

Those "few more bucks" end up in the right manager's PnL who gets promoted, though. Nobody at Lenovo leadership cares about Lenovo beyond the next few years; that's the problem.

cwkoss 4y ago
Would be interesting to develop an executive/managerial compensation structure that functions like a 10-year call option. Maybe it could feel a bit like TV show 'residuals' - even if you leave the company you'd still get a check in the mail for the company's longer term success. So much of the societal harm of corporate america comes from short term optimization at the expense of long term value. Would be great if businesses recognized this and found a good way to attract talent that thinks in decades rather than quarters. How many CEOs dump all their stock right after leaving a company?
- cwkoss 4y ago
  Maybe you could do a 10 year stock grant that is fully vested regardless of employment, and grant the same amount at the same schedule each year (or more frequently) so number of options is proportional to length of employment?
susanasj 4y ago
I think this has generally been true of a lot of American companies for a while now. I would add it's not even "next few years", it's more like "next few quarters". If the CEO can juice the stock price for say, four quarters, he may walk away with several million in the bank and who cares what happens after that?
- jldugger 4y ago
  > I think this has generally been true of a lot of American companies for a while now. Lenovo isn't even an American company. Wikipedia lists their global headquarters as in Beijing.
  - 4y ago

Beltalowda 4y ago

> Wish things have changed in 10 years... apparently it didn't. We no longer have browser toolbars. I remember a time when I had customers come in with 4, 5, or even 6 different browser toolbars. The Google toolbar, the Yahoo toolbar, the McAfee toolbar, the Because-We-Fucking-Can toolbar, etc. Most laptops came with at least one toolbar pre-installed.

can16358p 4y ago
Oh. Totally forgot those IE-era toolbars. Nice improvement to get rid of those.
- Thlom 4y ago
  Haha! I was working IT support for the local municipality back then. One time I had to go into the office of the local orchestra to fix their computer which was "slow". When I turned it on there was a cat or a dog walking around on the screen, IE had at least 5 toolbars, including two porn tool bars and the bookmark menu was full of porn links. A hot mess to say the least. Cleaned it up and removed all junk, malware, spyware, toolbars and "fun" applets. Pretty sure it was back to the same mess a couple of weeks later ...
slaymaker1907 4y ago
Toolbars we're a big mistake, but I understand why people thought they might be a good idea. Explorer context menu hooks (i.e. open in VS Code) are really useful, and without the benefit of hindsight those seem similar to toolbars.

jedberg 4y ago

> How do manufacturers throw in all the crapware and expect a good user experience and happy customers? Oh of course, they don't care. Edit: To be clear I'm not defending the companies, they shouldn't put all this crapware on there. I'm just saying most customers won't notice it on a new laptop. In most cases on new laptops their crapware doesn't make a huge difference, because there is enough CPU headroom. The people who are doing so much that they would notice probably will reinstall fresh Windows anyway. The problem here was that it was a used laptop.

sparrc 4y ago
> The problem here was that it was a used laptop. How do you know this? I would expect a $500 used lenovo laptop to have decent-enough specs.