back to article Lenovo superdishes not-so-superdosh for Superfish superloss: $40 waiting for you if you bought adware laptop

Lenovo will pay $7.3m to settle a class-action lawsuit stemming from its bone-headed decision to cram some of its laptops with Superfish adware. The PC manufacturer struck a deal in a US district court in northern California that will allow customers who purchased an adware-laden laptop to claim a $40 payout (or a refund of …

  1. Version 1.0 Silver badge
    Pint

    I've been using Lenovo kit for years, originally purchased from IBM - and it's generally reasonably decent hardware - as for the bloatware, I kill it all when I boot the system for the first time. It takes a couple of beers to work through it but it's not that different from every other PC I've worked with - they are all bloatware ridden when they arrive at the door.

    In the US $40 will get me about two dozen Newcastle Brown Ales - sounds like a deal to me.

    1. Phil Kingston

      As I recall, Superfish was more than just a bit of bloatware, it was effectively a MITM attack.

    2. Nolveys

      As I recall Lenovo put information in the uefi that windows reads on boot. Windows then dutifully installs malware, even if it's a fresh install.

      1. FrankAlphaXII

        That they do, even if you blow away the four(!) "recovery" partitions.

        I bought a Lenovo once, right around when they did this Superfish bullshit. It was the first and the last time. This thing had four extra partitions, only one of which had recovery data on it. Its not like the other three had something like a UEFI hardware diagnostic program (like what HP's been doing on their Probooks and Elitebooks for a while now) either. There was something on them, it was big enough to have a full headless OS and then some on all three extra partitions.

        Being the not exactly paranoid, but not exactly clueless, person that I am, I started digging around and asking what the deal was. Funny thing is that I've yet to get a straight answer about what it was from the manufacturer. Lenovo have told me several different stories about them and none of them make sense. Fortunately the HDD failed after about a year and its been a paperweight ever since. I never trusted that machine because of any of that and I won't ever buy another from them.

        Dell may have awful support and abysmal components, and HP are fucking expensive (if you want decent warranty support anyway) with only marginally better components, but neither one of them fling malware at you if you format the hard drives because the installer stubs are hard coded into their firmware.

  2. Anonymous IV

    "Did you buy a Lenovo laptop with Superfish software on it?"

    "Then you may be eligible for a compensation payout. Contact one of our trained experts at Former-PPI-Scammers today!"

    How long before we see these?

  3. bombastic bob Silver badge
    Meh

    "Did you get Win-10-nic with ADWARE on it?"

    now waiting for THAT class action lawsuit...

    *crickets*

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