On my current laptop which is the second one I've had from Lenovo, as well as on several other Lenovo laptops of my friends, I've usually removed every single removable thing made by Lenovo. From my experience, just about one out of a dozen these programs is at least semi-accessible, and they've never been useful for anything to me or to my friends. Or, in other words, none of us has ever missed a single feature. :-)

The increase in system performance and stability is usually dramatic, and I believe it also improves security theoretically, having just what was supposed to be on the system itself. Since I remove all the preinstalled metro apps as well on Windows 8 and 10, this goes even further than just OEM software. :-)

I've done similarly on several HP and Acer laptops, one Fujitsu laptop, and I bet the situation is exactly the same with other OEM's.

Not to mention that many of these support centers, autoupdaters, diagnostic services, customer experience programs and whatnot have been known to contain functional malware or at least borderline cases or a lot of security holes in the best cases. A lot of stories like this can be googled from the past, as well as an occasional present one every now and then.

Lukas

Just get rid of the lenovo stuff unless its like chipset drivers or something. You can usually get the scoop on something by opening up task manager, ctrl shift tabbing back to the details tab, looking for names and reading the information there, if you don't know what a process is, google the exact name of it.

That's one positive thing that can be said about Windows 10, at least. Assuming that the computer you've bought either came with Windows 10 preinstalled, or you perform an upgrade from 7 or 8.1 using the offer for users of assistive technologies that Microsoft has mysteriously kept around, despite the fit they pitched when they realized that, despite the fact that the upgrade offer was more than publicly available, a whole flood of people were taking advantage of it, you don't have to mess around with entering a key when you format the system. Once that computer reconnects to the internet, your copy of Windows will be activated. So, if you're running Windows 10, getting rid of bloatware is a breeze.

Yep, just used the refresh tool yesterday for a clean install, and it worked perfectly. Just a couple clicks, and then waited until it was done, pressed windows u to bring up narrator, and i was good to go.

It's under settings, update and security, recovery.
Click the first get started button, then follow the prompts. If you choose recet, all your data will be whiped, so be careful!
after your computer reboots, wait a while, this can take a long time, in my experience about halfe an hour. After that, press windows + enter, then complete the windows setup. O, and before I forget, you probably should prepare an nvda portable, if you use nvda that is, so you can get a in my experience good screenreader very quickly.