Do Thinkpads ship with bundled bloatware?

Or is it just OS + drivers?

 

It depends on what you classify as bloatware but I find the ThinkPad range to fare better than some of its rivals (particularly those from Sony and Acer). You do get a bit of additional software on the ThinkPads such as the Corel software, Office Trial and all the Thinkvantage tools but still I found this to be a bit too much for my liking (87 processes on idle). I tend to prefer keeping things to a minimum hence why I clean install my systems just so I can choose what applications I want on my system and exclude those that I don't need.

 

They come with quite a bit of Lenovo utilities, some you may or may not find useful, but I wouldn't call them Bloatware. They may not be useful to you, but we're not talking Asus style bloatware so they do have their uses to some so it's worth checking what they do and whether you want to keep them or not. There is some trial software which you'll obviously want to remove though.

 

There is more bloatware in the current generation ThinkPads, than there was in the previous generation. The comparison I am making is the W530 to the W520 or the T430s to the T420s.

I guess the additional revenue was too hard for Lenovo to resist.

 

As mentioned by others, they do come with some extra Lenovo software and a few trail versions of third party software. However, I found most of the Lenovo software to be very useful so I wouldn't call it bloatware. There is a few third party trail packages etc like Sugar Sync, Nitro PDF, Symantec AV and a few more which I would consider bloatware, especially things like the trail version of Nitro and Symantec but they are very easy to remove.

There is actually a number of useful tweaks that Lenovo have performed on the factory image to bring you what they call "Lenovo Enhanced Experience 3" - look it up if you wish. These tweaks are said to actually speed the system up over a stock clean image so I wouldn't say that a clean install in required if that's your concern.

I personally find SkyDrive to be a great cloud solution for sharing files between devices hence have no use for Sugar Sync.

 

The good thing about all the "extra" software that ThinkPads ship with is that it's easily removable...and no, not all of it is bloatware, at least in my opinion.

 

I don't feel any new Lenovo comes with bloatware, ThinkVantage stuff is pretty useful. If you want bloatware, go buy an HP.

 

I consider anything above the OS not made by Lenovo to be bloatware.

 

Eh, some of the pre-installed software isn't bad, ie Skype, Chrome, etc. I don't think Thinkpads have much bloatware, although there are some Lenovo tools and software that I would remove.

And even HP isn't too horrible anymore, at least in W8. After a few simple uninstalls, the new desktop I picked up for my parents was back to stock W8. Most of the bloatware is now in "apps," which are thankfully very simple to remove.

 

I like to decide what I install on the machine I purchased with MY money.

Lenovo isn't doing this to make it convenient for the user. They do it to make money. It is a revenue stream, pure and simple.

And the Lenovo image IS getting fatter with bloat. I was surprised with the T430s image we received.

 

I don't really mind Lenovo's various utilities - what I classify as bloatware is things like 30 day antivirus trials, download accelerators, trial/"lite" versions of backup software, browser toolbars, etc. Basically, anything that was included mainly because of monetary reasons rather than system performance or user experience reasons.

That is disappointing to hear. Given how business class machines are expensive enough that they don't need to be subsidized by third parties for the OEM to break even, I was hoping Lenovo would stick to a small business/IT friendly approach.

 

HP have so much bloatware, they have an option in the recovery partition for drivers only. That's how much crapware is on an HP. Even their entry level business line ProBooks have a ton of junk on it.

With your logic, good luck ever buying anything from any OEM without bloatware, it's that plain and simple. If it bothers you that much, do a clean install or remove all the things you don't want. When I bought my X220 tablet new, I found almost no bloatware on it.

 

Out of those, I think Lenovo only includes an antivirus (Norton). Not unreasonable.

Well, what I found was that that wasn't really the case, at least with their desktop Pavilion line. Might be true for some of their laptops or on past W7 machines (I wouldn't know), but it's certainly not that bad in W8 on the desktop I bought.

 

From a T530 page in the "Personal Systems Reference Lenovo ThinkPad Notebooks" document:



The list is long, with the notes: "only some listed." Most people call is bloatware and I won't disagree.

I either do a clean system install or a thorough uninstall of preloaded stuff.

Right.

 

From the list Kaso mentioned I uninstalled:

Lenovo SimpleTab
All Symantec (Norton) Software
Evernote
Nitro PDF
Intel Small Business Advantage

I didn't have Office 2010 pre-installed but I did install my own 64bit copy of MS Office 2010. I also removed both Lenovo RapidBoot applications but only because I installed a SSD and moved my OS to it, had I not, I would of left both RapidBoot apps installed. I found them fairly useful when used in traditional HDD systems.

All in all, it's not a long list of software I had to uninstall. For me, it was much quicker to remove these few applications than install a clean image and then have to worry about installing all the different device drivers to make the laptop work like factory again.

Had the image been full of difficult to remove bloatware, I would of installed a clean image but that's not the case. Performance wise, I actually see very little reason/benefit in install a clean Windows image over simply uninstalling the unwanted apps.

 

That is my point exactly. The T420's and T420s had almost no bloat. The T430s by comparison had quite a bit. The list Kaso provided for the T530 is identical to what I saw on the Windows 7 image we received with the T430s.

I never said anything about not buying because of the bloatware. You are right, that is impossible because OEMs are paid to put the "offers" on the machine. Lenovo had been very good about keeping it to a minimum until recently. Apparently no longer.

And for the record, this is what the original poster was asking about. I believe the topic is fully covered now.

Is that logical enough for you?

 

The OP's question:

The answer: No, not just OS + drivers.