3 ms·

I can't help but take this with a pinch of salt. I own a Thinkpad x220t, which is an amazing little machine (except maybe for the wonky wifi) but I completely f

I can't help but take this with a pinch of salt. I own a Thinkpad x220t, which is an amazing little machine (except maybe for the wonky wifi) but I completely fail to see how most of the Lenovo software is "required". Take for instance the wifi manager, which crams a huge icon in the corner of your screen and somehow makes connecting to wifi even slower than it already is (not even speaking to the atrocious interface). I regularly disable the thing, yet Lenovo's updates insist on re-enabling it, without my consent. And this isn't the only Lenovo "required" software to have this behavior. There's also the system health thing, which will seemingly randomly pop up when I'm watching a film or playing a game. I'm really curious, how does Lenovo think this improves user experience?

drzaiusapelord 12y ago
We buy these for work. We use our own Windows images because the stock image is just a nightmare of OEM crap. Its just shocking how much they put there. Before we used images we would just push them out as-is and it would cause all sorts of weird and hard to solve issues. One day no one could search their Outlook. Turns out that there's a Lenovo 'speed boost' service installed by default. It literally just sits there and then disables the Windows Search Service arbitrarily. Without that service, you can't search for files, emails, etc. How that made it to production equipment is mind-blowing. Took a while to figure out. We would re-index and restart the services, etc but it came back. There's a lone Lenovo support thread on their website about this where the customer answers his own question. Even Lenovo support doesn't know about this junk. Sadly, the stock Windows experience is pretty pleasant, its just most people will never experience it. I'm not sure who is clamoring for a 3rd party "wireless manager" or "update helper" or "speed boosters." Probably no one but product managers at Lenovo know that without this ecosystem of add-on crapware, their jobs would probably be eliminated. The above is just the "business productivity" apps. On their consumer models, they're chocked not only with a lot of these apps but also tons of 3rd party pre-loads like multiple ebook readers, Norton AV, Evernote, etc. No wonder so many people just buy OSX machines. You get just as good, if not better hardware, and a machine that's usable right out of the box. With PCs, it seems like these 3rd party companies are the real customer and we're the product. That's okay with free stuff, but if I'm spending $1,000 or more, I expect to be treated a lot better.

drzaiusapelord 12y ago

We buy these for work. We use our own Windows images because the stock image is just a nightmare of OEM crap. Its just shocking how much they put there. Before we used images we would just push them out as-is and it would cause all sorts of weird and hard to solve issues. One day no one could search their Outlook. Turns out that there's a Lenovo 'speed boost' service installed by default. It literally just sits there and then disables the Windows Search Service arbitrarily. Without that service, you can't search for files, emails, etc. How that made it to production equipment is mind-blowing. Took a while to figure out. We would re-index and restart the services, etc but it came back. There's a lone Lenovo support thread on their website about this where the customer answers his own question. Even Lenovo support doesn't know about this junk. Sadly, the stock Windows experience is pretty pleasant, its just most people will never experience it. I'm not sure who is clamoring for a 3rd party "wireless manager" or "update helper" or "speed boosters." Probably no one but product managers at Lenovo know that without this ecosystem of add-on crapware, their jobs would probably be eliminated. The above is just the "business productivity" apps. On their consumer models, they're chocked not only with a lot of these apps but also tons of 3rd party pre-loads like multiple ebook readers, Norton AV, Evernote, etc. No wonder so many people just buy OSX machines. You get just as good, if not better hardware, and a machine that's usable right out of the box. With PCs, it seems like these 3rd party companies are the real customer and we're the product. That's okay with free stuff, but if I'm spending $1,000 or more, I expect to be treated a lot better.