Ethics and privacy aside, I just find it plain weird that hardware vendor would deliberate make their own product worse like that. And this is not the first tim

Ethics and privacy aside, I just find it plain weird that hardware vendor would deliberate make their own product worse like that. And this is not the first time Lenovo has done something like this, apparently they did face any consequences. When I still worked as a sysadmin/support person, the ritual for preparing a new PC for use included replacing the preinstalled Windows 8/8.1 with a fresh install of Windows 7 from a vanilla installation medium. This was in part because the software our SCADA people used required Windows 7, but we did it to all PCs just to get rid of the useless crap vendors would ship with their machines. Fortunately, the Windows 8/8.1 Pro license allowed us to do that. But I don't know if the Home license does, and frankly, you cannot expect non-tech people to do that. As a long-time Linux/BSD user on my private machines, I am glad I don't have to deal with these problems in my spare time, but I am part of a pretty small minority in this regard. I remember reading a story about the development of the Apple Macintosh and its OS, and one developer talked about how Steve Jobs gave him a hard time about the time it took the machine to boot. Even if you shave off just one second, he argued, imagine how much time that saves all the users over the lifetime of their computers. And now imagine how much time is wasted, in total, because of hardware vendors sabotaging their own products.