I think the thing with Lenovo is, their hardware is sometimes excellent for the price. It's like they are Intel with a tick-tock cadence except the ticks are all complete duds. Just make sure to wait for a new model to accumulate at least 6 months of solid reviews before pulling the trigger.

I've been getting ThinkPads on corporate refresh cycles for 15 years and after they sold to Lenovo, I never know if a new machine will turn out to be a flaky piece of junk or totally solid and well built. Seems like it's always one or the other.

Yeah, you are totally right.

You can't necessarily remove it. For example, there's a mechanism called the Windows Binary Platform Table that automatically copies an EXE from the UEFI image and executes it with kernel-level privileges on each boot. It's intended to be used to deliver drivers or anti-theft software after a clean install, but Lenovo was using it to deliver malware, and there's nothing you can do about it unless you have a signed image without the malware included.

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/08/12/lenovo-used-a-hidde...

But the second this news broke, Lenovo backed our immediately and issued a firmware update removing the bloatware.

At least this issue should be solved.