Lenovo pre-loads select laptops with now-hackable adware. YAY!

[Phyeir]

The program is called Superfish, it was intended to display related ads in browser, but it acts as a middle man, similar to some malicious adware or trojan programs. Customers have been complaining for a few months, but now that word has leaked that it's been cracked, people are for some reason upset.

Here's a story about it and if you have one of their newer PCs (Sept 2014 or later) are in the link...

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2886...erfish-adware-presintalled-on-lenovo-pcs.html

Wonder how long it will take for Lenovo to recover their rep after this one (not that it was doing that great since the buyout...)

 

[NeoSneth]

First thing I do a clean wipe anyways. OEM Installs are terrible.

They still make great notebooks. Their Yoga's compete very well with Surface Pro's.

 

[Cylotron]

before someone jumps in and says "get a mac!"... we regularly do mac virus removal at work ^_^

 

[cdamm]

before someone jumps in and says "get a mac!"... we regularly do mac virus removal at work ^_^

yes- but do you remove apple installed adware? do macs come with viruses preinstalled? oh wait.

 

[bartre]

yes- but do you remove apple installed adware? do macs come with viruses preinstalled? oh wait.

yeah, Mac OS.

 

[famicommander]

*usual Linux related smugness*

But seriously, working at a computer store has already put Lenovo on my "fuck that" list as far as laptops go. Acer/Gateway/eMachines, HP, Dell, MSI, Lenovo... at least in my experience, all have extremely high return rates. Some models are worse than others, but I'm the guy who takes the new laptops off the truck and puts the broken ones back on and you notice stuff like that after a while.

Toshiba, Asus, and Apple are the ones that seem to not come back, even relative to the fewer amounts of those brands we sell. Sony used to be good too, but we don't even have any of those any more.

 

[SNKorSWM]

If its price bottoms out, I just might get one, do a full wipe and install XP on it instead.

 

[ki_atsushi]

If its price bottoms out, I just might get one, do a full wipe and install XP on it instead.

Exactly. That would be great, I wouldn't mind a dirt cheap Lenovo Y50. Slight upgrade from my Y500.

Just wipe the OS and be done with it. They're good computers.

 

[Heinz]

First thing I do is format any prebuilt computer. It's not even clean after uninstalling everything.

 

[Tacitus]

you guys are really glossing over the interesting and nefarious part of this story...

 

[Cylotron]

If its price bottoms out, I just might get one, do a full wipe and install XP on it instead.

I never understood why XP was so popular. I got it as soon as it was available(just like all versions of Windows). I didn't like it for the longest time and primarily stuck with Win2K(had dual-boot). XP did have a lot of bugs, but were fixed with updates/service packs. Vista had bugs also(which were also fixed) although the #1 problem with it was memory. They'd sell systems with Vista that had 512MB memory when realistically, it needed at least 2GB minimum to perform decently. 7 was a big improvement(best Win OS so far) & I had been running 7 for some time... but now I only use 8.1
I decided to do a speed test with 7 vs 8.1 ... I did a clean install of 7, then wiped the drive & did a clean install of 8.1(on the same computer of course). I found that 8.1 not only booted much faster, but overall performance was better as well. Also, I do music production & performance with my PC and occasional bugs/glitches I had with 7, I don't experience with 8.1 at all.

 

[ki_atsushi]

you guys are really glossing over the interesting and nefarious part of this story...

Yes, how easy it it too spoof encryption certificates? Doesn't look to good on microsoft either.