Maybe the most frustrating thing for me is how often I'm working with people who are apologetic and unsure BECAUSE of these derailments

They think it's their fault! They think they're not capable of doing things BECAUSE they keep getting fucked with by this user-hostile crap

I spend a lot of time explaining the same thing over and over again

"It's not your fault. You didn't do anything wrong. You're completely capable of making sense of this machine. It's just that some asshole got a bonus for trying to confuse you so a little graph would go up."

Getting lots of questions about how to do this on Lenovo and other machines. YMMV, but here's what I did:

Add/Remove Programs, in Windows. Then I found everything from Lenovo and uninstalled.

You can use this support article to get started:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uninstall-or-remove-apps-and-programs-in-windows-4b55f974-2cc6-2d2b-d092-5905080eaf98…

Meanwhile, I enjoy Steven's war stories, so I got quite a bit of mirth from this drive-by.

I do quite a bit of retro-computing too. These points are orthogonal to the OP's issue:

the INCENTIVES of providers to fuck the consumer are so much worse now

It's depressing to be a technologist today because the industry around us is committed to all manner of cheesedick nonsense to goose the quarterly numbers of this or that or the other thing

and so much of it built on surveillance that would not have been practical in the past

I understand the incentives of an architect of today's order to defend it

But it doesn't change the facts: it was easier to be excited by technology 20 years ago. Today it requires constant scrutiny and skepticism because of the dubious ethics of an entire industry

Every new device, service, software, you have to ask: what creepy shit are these guys trying to pull? Who am I letting onto my network? What are the downsides of their incentives relative to mine?

It used to just be fun.

Replying to @_danilo and

Is that stuff easy to get rid of or do they throw it back on with each ‘update’? I lean now to just getting my older parents iPads with keyboards vs laptops.

I haven’t bought a pre-built PC in a long time so maybe it’s changed, but it will vary depending on manufacturer. Sometimes it’s best to just do a few short install of Windows to truly get rid of everything, but other times you can get away with just deleting the bloat.

Replying to @_danilo

I wonder how much Apple benefits from not allowing that. Before I switched would always spend the first few hours with a new computer uninstalling manufacturer malware and installing tools Microsoft forgot

Replying to and @_danilo

Part of Apple's "it just works" reputation is absolute control of the user experience as both a hardware and software manufacturer, yeah.

Replying to @_danilo and

I hope this is what takes to the mainstream

I still have my Gazelle Pro laptop that I bought in, geez, 2012. Not top gaming hardware, anymore, but it's survived the upgrades from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS through 14.04, 16.04, 18.04, 20.04, and into 22.04 LTS.

Solid as a rock, and I still highly recommend them. It just works.

Replying to and @_danilo

CCleaner cleans ypur registry, your browser and some clutter. However CCleaner can't determine what software is in fact bloatware or not.

Replying to @_danilo

I purchased a couple of inexpensive laptops recently-- and both of them had this issue. So I just created a Windows installation USB drive from Microsoft's website and did a clean install of Windows 10 without all of the junk, then went and downloaded drivers as needed.

Replying to and @_danilo

With the lower-priced/lower-power devices, especially all that bloatware/surveillance tech really eat up the processing power and render the device extremely slow.