As well as the bloatware added deliberately by Microsoft that's already mentioned, this method can't touch spyware and bloatware that's automatically reinstalled by the BIOS after reinstalling Windows.

Unsurprisingly, the only company I could find evidence of actually having done this is Lenovo:

https://betanews.com/2015/08/13/lenovo-bios-tool-prevents-cl...

Unfortunately, this "vendor crap" is now part of the OS.

It's even worse than that. There's 2 types of crap now: vendor crap and Windows crap.

You can avoid vendor crap by reinstalling a fresh version of Windows from Microsoft, but you'll still get Microsoft crap (i.e., various apps from the Microsoft store pre-installed with links prominently displayed on the Start menu).

These are what Microsoft calls "suggestions" (aka adverts). I think they only actually install when you first click on them.

Fortunately they're UWP apps so are easy to completely remove. Turning off the "Show suggestions" settings will stop them coming back.

A clean install of Windows 10 (not n versions) is shipped with stupid game installers for things like candy crush, Disney magic and march of empire which you can remove easily, but not just "hide" with disabling suggestions.[1]

[1] just did a clean install of win10 home

Yes, I meant disabling "suggestions" stops them coming back again in the future. Although Windows has had update "bugs" whereby this setting is ignored. This is solved by delaying feature updates until at least a week or so after release.

Maybe I'm the only one here, but it seem absurd to me to count on Google, an advertising company, not advertise on Chromebooks.

Not yet ... perhaps. Perhaps. Not ? No way.

ChromeOS is open-source. Last I looked, their build process was a horror beyond all reason. However, it would at least be possible to strip out any advertising built into the OS. Thing is though, Google controls the advertising on the top two pages on the Internet, and as long as that's true, they don't really need to do anything other than make sure you get there. Which is the strategy behind Google Fiber, Loon, and to some degree Android, more-or-less the reason for Chrome's existence, and why Chromebooks are designed around constant Internet access: all roads lead to Rome.

Yep while everyone was fighting yesterday's war with Microsoft another company took over the internet. Well done guys. Google has more power than MS did at any point in the 90s.

Since Chromebooks are very internet-forward, they get plenty of advertising opportunities without installing banner ads or something similar into the OS. Are you expecting them to start advertising on the Android home screen too?

They already do something better for their ad business moat. They just push their Google Apps bloatware collection on the Android ecosystem at every possible chance they get. I use none of it, yet it still comes with my Samsung phone whether I like it or not. I would expect them to continue that approach with any operating systems they control.

Seems counterintuitive that you take such a strong stance against bloatware and yet use a Samsung phone. The preinstalled (and non-removable) mountain of crap was the reason I gave up on them after my Galaxy S3.

Not that other vendors are much better, mind. But I'm quite happy with my OnePlus for now.

Then they all come back with the next update.

I'm in the insider program, they don't/haven't come back in ages.

I just had to delete "Candy Crush Soda Saga". Was it there before I did that ridiculous registry hack to prevent it? Or did they add a new one at some point... Who knows. Its clear they don't actually want people disabling the installation of them.

Does this only happen on Windows Home?

This is also true for my recent numerous installs of Pro, which is absurd

Another fun fact is if you remove the App Installer or whatever it is called, you can't remove the "adware" apps

You can easily remove them. It's still annoying having to deleted Candy Crush.

I would have a hard time justifying $400 for a Chromebook when a tablet+keyboard is cheaper and slightly better.

Plus with Surface Go....$400 seems like a rip off for a Chromebook.

Sometimes you can't even reinstall Windows easily, for example Dell has set SSD mode to Intel RAID by default (can be switched to AHCI) but Windows installation media doesn't come with Intel RAID driver by default. Installer doesn't see the disk at all (until switched to AHCI).

True,

I was using my brothers machine, which is win10 - and I havent used windows in years - and I was disgusted by the crappy UI/UX I was given - with its inbuilt notifications which even pop-up to tell you that you went into full screen mode and told it not to pop-up....

Also, the start menu looks like a freaking spyware minefield they way it takes up 60% of the screen when it is activated.

Windows is absolutely a mess these days.

Windows 10 start menu doesn't take up that much screen unless the user has configured it as such.

Start menu from store is pretty clean. Go to a microsoft store and mess around with devices from there - they are "signature devices" that are clean.

Windows isn't a mess these days in any sense of the word, It's just people who have a negative opinion of it speak about it with sympathy from others who have a negative opinion.

The Windows subsystem for Linux is awesome, the app store is a move in the right direction (damned if you do, damned if you don't) and they're closing out a lot of legacy design elements with their annual updates. (dark mode, better high res / high dpi support, consistency of legacy/new elements. yaddy yaddy yadda)

With a few minutes of trying you can all but customize the entire interface to your liking.

ChromeOS has the benefit of not having decades of legacy to preserve - and Android is suffering many of the negatives you speak of with regards to Windows and iOS has completely the opposite problem being a controlled absolute dictatorship err walled garden.

My "signature edition" Surface Book 2 running Windows 10 Professional came with a bunch of crap on the start menu such as Candy Crush Saga, Twitter, some travel app, Minecraft, and advert for Office 365 and some other crap I can't remember.

I had to right-click and uninstall them all manually but then a few days later a couple of them returned?! I ended up searching for a PowerShell script that actually removes them. Until a few months later when Microsoft rolled out the April 2018 update and they all magically reappeared again so I had to look up that fucking PowerShell script again.

I could kind of accept this on the Home version but on the PROFESSIONAL version?! No fucking way. Why on earth should my pro version come with Minecraft and Twitter?!

And this is a £2500 laptop made and sold by Microsoft! Not some £200 Acer from PC World.

Those aren't even installed and you can turn off app recommendations

Settings->personalization->start-> make sure "Show suggestions occasionally in start" is off.

Minecraft is awesome BTW :)

My android phone came with a ton of crap, my amazon tablet had a bunch of amazon crap.. i don't really think showcasing the marketplace of the hardware you have selected is that evil - especially since its easy to customize if it really bothers you.

> Those aren't even installed and you can turn off app recommendations

They installed the moment it saw a network connection which was before I even finished setup because it set that up during the OOBE.

> Settings->personalization->start-> make sure "Show suggestions occasionally in start" is off.

That setting does not seem to have any effect on Candy Crush, Twitter, etc. on a default install.

> Minecraft is awesome BTW :)

Yes it is but not on my £2500 business laptop. Unless I specifically install it to use.

>My android phone came with a ton of crap, my amazon tablet had a bunch of amazon crap.. i don't really think showcasing the marketplace of the hardware you have selected is that evil - especially since its easy to customize if it really bothers you.

I am not talking about Android or Amazon though am I?

But if you want to bring up Android - My Pixel 2 XL didn't come with a bunch of third party apps and/or adverts for their own, not free, software. Sure it came with some Google specific apps but that is why I didn't list OneNote, Edge, Groove Music or Photos in my list of Windows 10 apps as they are understandable to include even if I have no use for them.

And allow me to bring up my MacBook Pro which didn't come with any third party apps and/or adverts for their own, not free, software. In fact the only thing it comes with is macOS and the iWorks suite (free btw). And if you do a clean install of macOS yourself you don't even get iWorks pre-installed, you have to manually grab them again from the App Store.

The Windows experience is horrible out of the box even on a "signature edition" system. Yes you can go in and "fix" things with PowerShell scripts and changing a few options in Settings.appx but my point is that shouldn't be needed on a so called 'professional' operating system that comes on a £2000+ computer direct from Microsoft.

Couldn't agree more. I'm trying Windows 10 after many years on Linux, and I'm amazed at the hot mess I find. There isn't even a usable terminal. ConEmu looks like it could work with enough tweaking, still trying to get all characters to show up properly (many do, some don't).

Conemu works (and is opensource) and Microsoft has already said they're adding official pty support.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2018/08/02/wind...

Every mac owner quickly switches to iTerm from built in terminal nd lets be honest - there are a bazillion payware options for windows people could use too.

I think they are working on that though.

Since they tweaked the CMD for the Linux subsystem

You can also buy a windows 10 laptop from the microsoft store and not getting any crap ware installed on it.

Every other OS I've used recently (MacOS, Ubuntu, Centos, RHEL, ChromeOS) doesn't require special knowledge or extra work to remove pre-installed spyware/bloatware. They may well have crap installed, but at least they're subtle about it.

I remember Ubuntu coming installed with Amazon links. It certainly did require special knowledge to remove it.

https://www.lifewire.com/remove-amazon-application-from-ubun...

At least with Windows you can just right click, uninstall. That is until vendors break that mechanism too

If you are using Ubuntu, then you atleast have some knowledge about the OS and would be savvy enough to Google and run some commands on the terminal to fix it.

Compared to Windows, which has a huge user base with absolutely no understanding of how the OS works and what to do if you don't like it OOTB.

The current version of Ubuntu just has an affiliate link to Amazon. It may be overly difficult to remove and upsetting to some users, but it's nowhere near as egregious as the software many Windows machine are shipped with.

The geeks could already get this stuff on their system easily. 10+ years in UX design has taught me that little is more powerful than setting something to “default”.