Itās like they want to lose customers in the consumer marketā¦
I have taken to buying refurbs from a local place that is mostly business class machines which donāt do that crap and they have a fresh os and required drivers install only, and you can get ubuntu if that is your thing.
The Right to Privacy is something that is to protect people from government intrusion into and surveillance of our private lives. If it was the government doing this the lawsuits would be getting filed so fast the friction would burn down the courthouse. But its not the government.
We now need to extend our Right to Privacy to protect us from corporations.
O holy hell, there it is in my system. Thanks, Lenovo.
Anybody know how to uninstall this? If I delete the entire Lenovo folder will anything go belly-up?
Not just refurbished ThinkPads. Just found (and disabled) it on a W540, purchased new from Lenovo about 6 or 7 months ago.
As an aside, the W540 is one of the benighted machines that has the worst implementation of a major feature Iāve ever seen in my 20+ years of using ThinkPads - the terrible Trackpoint/TouchPad that has no actual mouse buttons, but only areas of the pad that you click to try to get at different functions.
Add/remove programs.
If that doesnāt work, nuke its startup entry(I can help via PMās).
If that doesnāt work Iāll send you my Skype id.
Look on the bright side: they come with Windows 7. Thatās at least better than that piece of shit Windows 8 with those horrendous ātilesā.
I just found it on two of our newer work computers (win 7 pro 64) though annoyingly this isnāt listed in programs and features so what i did was disable the triggers in task scheduler and renamed that ācustomer feedback programā folder. However, one machine had two folders with a number appended so itās possible they might just be installed again if you donāt disable those triggers. Also updating the solution center? May also do the same.
What microsoft are currently doing with win 10 and trying to retroactively infect win 7 & 8 with makes lenovo look like punters.
I liked windows 8 better, but I always immediately forced any windows 8 install back to regular desktop mode, I whole heatedly agree about forcing tile modeā¦LAME.
thanks for the article. So disappointing! I love thinkpads and also dual-boot linux. But even if I use them for only Linux, Iām still supporting this immoral behavior by buying their products.
Found it, thanks!
URRGG!
Thanks for posting and cross-linking this latest act of customer abuse by Lenovo.
Iām writing after having just the guts out of the offending software discussed in the article as well as a number of other Lenovo apps that - in retrospect - were at best bloatware.
Oh, so be aware that the offending, intrusive app was found on my Lenovo machine, a refubāed Ideapad. Check yours today!
I have one at work, and that trackpad is completely useless.
I have a lenovo I only use for porn.
Oh, but theyāve been doing this for ages now! They install Perion Networkās Conduit toolbar in their Lenovo SafeProtect toolbar. When I tried to track down what it installs, I found Perionās website and created my own free toolbar with the same components, and I attached it to notepad.exe.
It gathers location data and other nasties.
I asked Lenovo about this but they denied it was malware, but they would not tell me what information it was gathering. Interestingly, initially they denied installing it at all!
That wasā¦ Until I pointed them to a press release that showed that they were indeed paying Conduit Client Servicesā¦
Perion later acquired them:
Hello,
Hereās a good article explaining how to install a replacement TrackPad from a W541 which adds the three-buttons back:
http://www.thomasclaudiushuber.com/blog/2015/03/12/solved-lenovo-the-clickpadultranav-and-the-missing-hardware-buttons-w540-t540-w541/
I did this on my T440p and itās a great improvement.
Hello,
Do other computer manufacturers do similar things?
Also, these were refurbished systems from around 2012 (I think). Is this behavior present on currently shipping systems running Windows 10?
Cory, I hope that you donāt literally throw the hard drives away?
Back in 2009 he described āleaving the original drive intact for easy troubleshootingā, which implies not. ISTR reading somewhere he used to put them back in when he sold them on, but maybe I dreamt that. Itās what I would do: the buyer gets an instant virgin Windows install on a second-hand machine, and I get to put the SSD, & my data, in my next laptop.
I have sworn I will never, ever buty another piece of shit Lenovo product, and I will stick to that.
I bought a Yoga 2 Pro before their previous internet-security-destroying virus was found. It is literally the worst computer I have ever owned. The hardware is as buggy as can be.
That, plus their clear distain for their consumers, means I wonāt touch them with a 50-foot pole.
