Lenovo caught bloating PCs as profits plunge. http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2015/08/13/lenovo-bloatware-redux/1
Surely behaviour like this is grounds for every customer to take court action and would be entitled to way more money than the laptop cost.
The other companies involved in the UEFI Forum should have blocked the introduction of the Windows Platform Binary Table (WPBT), it's nothing more than a DIY rootkit installer.
As usual, companies' consumer laptop/desktop lines are full of ****, and the business lines are fine.
I wouldn't be so sure that business lines are fine, WPBT was introduced in Windows 8 so all modern (circa 2011 onwards) computers come with the ability to inject "wpbbin.exe" and have Windows automatically run it during boot. HP have been doing a similar thing for years with their Computrace tools, the only reason Lenovo have been caught out is because they used WPBT in a way that was against Microsoft's recommendations.
What, injecting insecure bloatware into an anti-theft feature that causes it to survive fresh OS installs from the customer's own media? If you've got a source for that, that's one of Monday's news topics sorted...
if you remove all partitions, including say a full zero wipe against the drive (killdisk) does the software still reinstall? if it does then this is from the actual security chips with in the computer and should be able to be turned off in the bios?
Whilst it's only anecdotal, If memory serves Tosh's TEMPRO monitoring gubbins and other OEM bloat is an utter twunt to remove and again iirc it survived a 'burn it and start over' reinstall of windows... however this was a while ago and I'm not wiping the 'rents laptop to test a theory...
This is why i love the surface pro line, zero add in bs. Its also why australias education department dropped them as a supplier. With the layoffs they bette rstart with their software devision. And the staff responsible. Otherwise i would say this is an act of goverment spying.
Even changing your drives wouldn't get rid of it as it's contained in the UEFI BIOS, supposedly there's a switch in the BIOS to disable WPBT, the section that loads "wpbbin.exe" into memory that in turn Windows writes to disk, but I've read that some people have found "wpbbin.exe" on their system and don't have the ability to disable WPBT in the BIOS.
