Care to explain what you mean by that? As far as I can tell, vendors ship crapware as software installed on Windows, and you can always remove it by reinstalling Windows or often just uninstalling the bundled software.

Do they ever go beyond that?

Lenovo used the UEFI/BIOS tables to load crapware back into a fresh retail user-installed windows setup. The bios table was named Window Platform Binary Table

Lenovo? That sucks. I was considering a Thinkpad to get out of Apple's stranglehold. I'd put Linux on it of course, but I'm still not happy buying from a company that pulls crap like that.

I’m not defending the shit Lenovo‘s been pulling these last few years, but it’s worth noting that none of it (neither the Superfish fiasco nor this) affected ThinkPads. Apparently their consumer line and ThinkPads are run quite separately. I hope that keeps them from messing up the ThinkPads...

Lenovo don't do this any more, and offers a way to remove the LSE: https://support.lenovo.com/au/en/product_security/lse_bios_n...

No excuses of course, and Microsoft can share the blame too.

That mechanism only works through cooperation of the OS installation process. It's actually the OS that asks the device whether there is any crapware it is supposed to ingest and then goes on to ingest it.

As long as you consent to that, everything is fine I guess. The software is doing its job as an agent of its users.

I wonder if russian or chinese or indian computers have that kind of annoying software...