Lenovo Software Update Stealthily Installs Adware

An anonymous reader writes "A recent Lenovo automatic software update has the great feature of displaying annoying pop-up ads for Lenovo products. What's worse, it appears that many users are unable to turn the advertisement 'feature' off, subjecting them to pop-ups every couple of hours. Gee guys, a note about your 20% off sale in my e-mail wouldn't have bothered me that much, but you really had to pop up over top of my PowerPoint slides? I'm sure that all of my office colleagues will be running to order ThinkPads ..."

No kidding!

[C_Kode]

I ran into this problem the other day. It ask you if you do not want to show the ads anymore, but it doesn't accept your answer and shows them over and over. I finally figured out what app was causing it and disabled it in msconfig. I can't remember what it was right now, but when I get home I will reply to this with the name of the app to disable.

btw, I got the adware when I installed the Thinkpad Wireless software.

Just wait, it'll get even better

[TrentTheThief]

Just think how wonderful it will be once the red chinese government puts their own stealthy spyware right into the microcode!

Are you having paranoid thought now?

Re:Just wait, it'll get even better

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have any idea where your HP, Acer, Asus, Toshiba, or Sony laptop was actually built?

Re:this is dumb

[Lonewolf666]

It is frequently speculated that the OEMS get paid more for the adware than the Windows license costs them. So they can actually offer the PC with crapware cheaper.

For those with decent computer skills this means buying the PC as it is and reformatting the disk. Of course, when we are talking desktops some of us have very specific ideas of which components they want. In that case, build from components. :-)

Re:this is dumb

[Anonymous Showered]

What I did with my Dell 700m back in the day was buy it, unwrap it, boot it up and format with a XP Home OEM disc I downloaded off the web. I just used the same license key and didn't experience any WGA notification issues. I then downloaded the drivers for the graphic, chipset, etc. and had a fresh new installation without the bloat.

What the hell were they thinking?

[WCMI92]

What idiot in marketing (marketing majors have no souls) convinced an even bigger idiot in management that this would be a good idea?

People LOVE popups, right, everyone knows this, right?

A stunt like this isn't going to increase sales, it's going to DECREASE them. And, this is yet another example why I DO NOT run any sort of automatic update. I update software/drivers, etc, when I feel a NEED to do so, if it's working, leave it alone. Updates only usually end up in adding more bloat to a system anyway, look at how Acrobat reader is 10 times the size it was a couple years ago yet doesn't do anything significantly different.

Change of Plans

[Deton8]

Wow, that's an incredibly stupid thing for Lenovo to do. I was about to order a Lenovo for my next laptop and if it worked out I was going to ask our IT department to change from the current incumbents (Dell and Sony) to Lenovo for our sales and executive staff. I'm going to wait to see that this issue is fully resolved before making a move, and if they don't fix it, they can forget about 20 to 30 laptop orders a year from my company. I don't think my emotion would be unique -- I'm sure 90% of IT managers would disqualify Lenovo if they knew about this spam pop-up problem and didn't have an easy way to disable it enterprise-wide. Billions of dollars are at risk for something that probably only brings them a few hundred K$ per year. Bone-headed.

Re:Its over

[Anonymous Coward]

They were already on their way out the moment they were purchased by a foreign company with some degree of state control.

(Yeah, even the "domestic" companies foreign-source most of their parts but at least the system design is domestically controlled.)

I work for a defense contractor, the moment the Lenovo buyout happened we stopped buying Thinkpads and went to Dell. It was pretty much mandated by the customer. (If I recall correctly, there were a lot of news articles about the government banning further Thinkpad purchases post-Lenovo across the board around that time.)

Now, Lenovo has effectively done just what the US government feared they might do - try to sneak stuff onto customers' machines for their own gain.

Who knows what else in addition to this adware is getting slipped to customers?

Re:Wait...

[Stargoat]

I will preface this by saying that until today, I was an IBM / Lenovo shop with over 150 PCs in production.

This does not take a serious whack at Lenovo's credibility, this completely destroys it. I was willing to overlook crappy drivers and twenty hotfixes to make their garbage laptops work. But this is the straw that broke the camel's back. If I need a new laptop for my users, I will be getting Toshiba. I will be looking for a new desktop manufacturer as well.

Re:Wait...

[Anonymous Coward]

Toshiba can't give you the same SKU globally. Of course, we're a lot bigger organization - 90,000 machines, half of them notebooks - all of the notebooks Lenovo. No large company allows the Lenovo software (if it is even installed; it isn't on ours) to auto-update. So we will never notice this. It wouldn't update anyway even if it was loaded since our users are not administrators. If it wasn't for seeing this on Slashdot I'd never see it. BTW, these notebooks seem to be pretty darn good. Their docking solutions seem about the best available.

Since you are looking for business desktops, take a look at the dc7900 and later from HP - they are pretty nice machines (we've been using HP for our desktops).

Wait till they install

[JohnnyGTO]

Green Dam software. :-)

Re:Wait...

[Prosthetic_Lips]

Talking from the other side, Dell laptops are not as good as they used to be. I know people in college (mid-size state college), and of the computers with connection problems, ALL of them were Dell computers. No, not the odd Macintosh, or the no-name. Dell.

I'd like to hear from other people's experience about Dell laptops; are they as bad as the college kids report? Or is it something that the college is doing that whacks out the Dells?