Because the business and consumer teams at Lenovo are largely separate. I can't order a Yoga through my Thinkpad rep. I have to go to a retail vendor and us a credit card. I expect there are lots of people at the old IBM offices in New York who are as horrified as we are at when the consumer team agreed to.
Thinkpad T430s. It's a year old so I'm in the clear upon more detailed reading of the article. I usually do a clean install but when I bought this box it came installed with Win 7 and the discs I got were Win 8 only. Didn't come with a Win 7 serial. This is what I get for buying from a reseller on Amazon.
If you have Windows installed I think you can extract the license key from it (assuming Windows is genuine), then use it to do a clean install, or just save it for posterity in case the hard disk ever dies. As far as I know this is fine WRT Windows EULA.
no you cant - not in lenovo's case. The reason for this is that the keys for lenovo correspond to a very special Windows release that Microsoft specially bakes for Lenovo. You cannot use the keys on any other ISO.
This is also a big problem - you cant download these ISOs (unless some *rrentbay) and Lenovo does not give you CDs readily.
Hey, I use a desktop machine. That paints me as some kind of startup weirdo. Granted, it runs linux, but still, it doesn't fold in the middle or have it's own monitor and keyboard built in.
The time period where Superfish was included was a relatively small chunk of 2014, so you may not be impacted.
A good general guideline when buying an off-shelf Windows machine is to do a full wipe first. There may be some manufacturers who are immune to this, but assume everyone's included some bloatware. I find too many people who buy Windows machines start by attempting to manually remove this stuff, which is often a hopeless proposition. Clean wipe, reinstallation.
This isn't the reason why most startups/devs have moved to Apple, but it sure helps.
And you're still running the OS that it came with? Even if you want to keep Windows, always reinstall fresh. It's far easier than trying to hunt down every piece of malware they put on it
This is repeatedly recommended, but I think it's overlooking that not all manufacturer customization is entirely evil. You then to hunt down all the drivers for bits of the motherboard. Are you sure your power consumption settings are optimal after you've done this?
Windows has gotten pretty good at finding and installing drivers for you. I'm not sure about 8.1 (only used it briefly on a tablet that came with it installed) but with the 10 preview it has found and installed all the drivers I needed for the two Thinkpads I tried it on. It didn't download the Lenovo power management utility which is key to really squeezing the most out of it, but in my experience it isn't significantly better than Windows power management + keeping the screen brightness down (which is what the Lenovo utility does anyway).
