Time to wipe all that junkware off your PC. Especially if you have a Lenovo PC, but other manufacturers too... 6/9/2016

People have been dealing with slow PC's unnecessarily for far too long.  It's time to fix this.  With the recent spate of articles and attention, hopefully vendors will respond, but I kind of doubt anything will change.  Consider the following article entitled "Lenovo Tells Users to Uninstall Vulnerable Updater":
  https://threatpost.com/lenovo-tells-users-to-uninstall-vulnerable-updater/118436/

Sounds bad.  But really, the problem here is more universal and applies to all vendor-supplied software that comes pre-installed on almost every PC.

Besides the fact that much of this software is unnecessary an slows down your PC, check out this indictment by DUO Labs after they performed a security study:
  https://duo.com/blog/out-of-box-exploitation-a-security-analysis-of-oem-updaters

The article cuts to the chase with this quote:
"Spoiler: we broke all of them (some worse than others). Every single vendor had at least one vulnerability that could allow for a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacker to execute arbitrary code as SYSTEM."

What to do?

The easiest solution is to have an expert look at your PC and disable or uninstall unneeded vendor-supplied software.

The best solution is to do a clean install of Windows.  And the best way to do that is to, at the same time, pull the original hard drive from your system and add a new solid state drive or SSD.  This is actually killing four birds with one stone.

• You'll have a much more secure PC.  
• It will speed up by a factor of 1 to 4 times, literally.  
• Any other junk or malware that may have crept into your PC will be gone.  
• You are guaranteed to have all of your data intact as the original hard drive is untouched and you can then install it in a usb external case and use it for backup.

USB external case on Amazon: http://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00OFJ1UK6