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Lenovo tablet forced update shows un-dismissable, un-mutable, ad notifications

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Re: Lenovo tablet forced update shows un-dismissable, un-mutable, ad notifications

#71

Post by iarenaza »

gruez wrote: post #48
gigel82 wrote: post #24

Lenovo left a sour taste for me after they pushed a BIOS update through Windows Update on my daughter's Flex that bricked the device (in the middle of a school-week, while she was doing online school). There were dozens of reports of the same problem from other owners of that model, yet they refused to acknowledge the issue was theirs or offer any self-serve option (I remember most laptops nowadays can re-flash the B…

>I remember most laptops nowadays can re-flash the BIOS from an attached USB with specific format and layout Source for this? I've seen it available on various enthusiast desktop motherboards, but I haven't seen it on laptops. I haven't even seen it on the pricier thinkpad line.

I've done it at least twice with my Thinkpad T495. Bootable USB with El Torito format, if I remember it correctly. Using Lenovo official ISO images and instructions, etc.

Re: Lenovo tablet forced update shows un-dismissable, un-mutable, ad notifications

#72

Post by sneak »

elric wrote: post #29

Gentle reminder that Lenovo jumped the shark quite a while ago. The whole Superfish debacle, the spyware, the crapware, the endless stream of shitty decisions. Year after year, the hardware gets worse. Customer support gets worse. The sad thing is that they're still better than everything else out there. Which says a lot about the laptop industry in general.

> The sad thing is that they're still better than everything else out there.

They haven't ever been better than Apple laptop hardware, even in Intel-land.

There seems to be this common bias in PC laptop evaluation that excludes Apple machines from consideration when doing comparisons.

Apple makes the best x64 laptops, and has for years. Sadly, they will stop soon.

Re: Lenovo tablet forced update shows un-dismissable, un-mutable, ad notifications

#73

Post by gigel82 »

gruez wrote: post #48
gigel82 wrote: post #24

Lenovo left a sour taste for me after they pushed a BIOS update through Windows Update on my daughter's Flex that bricked the device (in the middle of a school-week, while she was doing online school). There were dozens of reports of the same problem from other owners of that model, yet they refused to acknowledge the issue was theirs or offer any self-serve option (I remember most laptops nowadays can re-flash the B…

>I remember most laptops nowadays can re-flash the BIOS from an attached USB with specific format and layout Source for this? I've seen it available on various enthusiast desktop motherboards, but I haven't seen it on laptops. I haven't even seen it on the pricier thinkpad line.

I can't find any Lenovo official documentation, but if you google for something like "lenovo laptop fn+r bios usb" you'll find a bunch of tutorials for how the recovery works.

It does not work on the Flex model line-up though (I presume because they didn't include the bootstrapper firmware or some h/w component).

Re: Lenovo tablet forced update shows un-dismissable, un-mutable, ad notifications

#74

Post by tyingq »

gruez wrote: post #48
gigel82 wrote: post #24

Lenovo left a sour taste for me after they pushed a BIOS update through Windows Update on my daughter's Flex that bricked the device (in the middle of a school-week, while she was doing online school). There were dozens of reports of the same problem from other owners of that model, yet they refused to acknowledge the issue was theirs or offer any self-serve option (I remember most laptops nowadays can re-flash the B…

>I remember most laptops nowadays can re-flash the BIOS from an attached USB with specific format and layout Source for this? I've seen it available on various enthusiast desktop motherboards, but I haven't seen it on laptops. I haven't even seen it on the pricier thinkpad line.

Instructions for one specific Dell laptop: https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetai...

Expand the "Installation Instructions" part, and you'll see "Updating the BIOS from BIOS Boot Menu (independent of operating system)"

I don't know if Dell supports it across all their laptops, but it has on the ones I've owned.

Re: Lenovo tablet forced update shows un-dismissable, un-mutable, ad notifications

#75

Post by willcipriano »

elric wrote: post #42
tehjoker wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I've never encountered any ads in printed books. Edit because I can't be bothered to reply to all the comments below: excerpts from other books (often by the same author, or in a similar genre) are not ads IMO. They're not intrusive. They're pretty much always relevant. They're fun to read. They don't contain tracking cookies. They're as benign as it gets.

You have never read a little golden book[0]? The back cover is often ads for other kids books. I recall the Goosebumps books did the same with a PO box that you could send a check to in order to get more books. Sci-fi paperbacks often have ads for other books as well.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Golden_Books

Re: Lenovo tablet forced update shows un-dismissable, un-mutable, ad notifications

#76

Post by Brian_K_White »

mschuster91 wrote: post #27
sergiotapia wrote: post #9

Same with my samsung tablet forcing itself to update. "You can dismiss this 1 more time" - why? It's my device I paid for it. It's very tiresome. What device can I buy that's just mine to do as I please. On desktop I'm already on Linux Mint. Looking for alts for phone and tablet.

I somewhat understand Samsung a bit. The amount of never updated Android devices that could be updated is immense, and support calls for long-banished issues that could be solved by a simple update are pointless and a waste of resources. The problem is that users suffer from "update fatigue" because they have to be (rightfully) afraid of entire UI overhauls or even more bugs after updates since no one does QA any mor…

fdroid does let you see and install previous versions perfectly simply.

One day SlimSocial broke. I pulled up the app in fdroid only exoecting to see a changelog for some recent update, but was pleasantly suprised to see this perfectly obvious and convenient Versions pull-down to install old versions. I used it, and it worked.

Re: Lenovo tablet forced update shows un-dismissable, un-mutable, ad notifications

#77

Post by jollybean »

Microsoft needs to fix this.

Edit: apparently I stand corrected I assumed this was a Windows Tablet, of course, the OS vendors should really step in here, they do have power in the equation. Ultimately, I would use the argument to the exec. team at Lenovo that the incremental revenue from these things just isn't worth it in the overall experience.

Often teams are tasked with coming up with new revenue models, it's often an internal, organizational issue as opposed to a coherent product vision.

Re: Lenovo tablet forced update shows un-dismissable, un-mutable, ad notifications

#78

Post by linguae »

This is despicable, and it's indicative of a trend I've been noticing over the years. Personal computing used to be about user empowerment. Today it seems to me that many tech companies treat their users as nothing more than either "eyeballs" to show ads to or as cows to be milked through vendor lock-in and subscription services. Either way, I feel the user experience has degraded in recent years, and I feel we increasingly have less control over our computers.

Thankfully alternatives exist. Linux and the BSDs keep evolving, Haiku and ReactOS continue to develop and may one day reach daily-driver status, there's still a thriving market for building your own x86-64 PCs (I'll be building a Ryzen 9 machine this weekend), and products like the Framework laptop, the PineBook, and the Librem laptop have me excited. Hopefully these alternatives will continue to evolve and take root so that way there's a formidable challenger to Big Tech.

Re: Lenovo tablet forced update shows un-dismissable, un-mutable, ad notifications

#79

Post by PostThisTooFast »

linguae wrote: post #78

This is despicable, and it's indicative of a trend I've been noticing over the years. Personal computing used to be about user empowerment. Today it seems to me that many tech companies treat their users as nothing more than either "eyeballs" to show ads to or as cows to be milked through vendor lock-in and subscription services. Either way, I feel the user experience has degraded in recent years, and I feel we incre…

People put up with it, and we all suffer. Google recently shat out a similarly offensive update to Android TV, so now the only UI on people's $4000 Sony TVs is 1/3 advertisements for stuff the user often doesn't even have access to. Disgraceful.

Re: Lenovo tablet forced update shows un-dismissable, un-mutable, ad notifications

#80

Post by tehjoker »

tehjoker wrote: post #30
elric wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digital TV in Belgium now includes unskippable ads, including in recordings of those shows. The reason why people switched to digital TV subscriptions, of course, was to be able to skip those ads in the first place. Apparently Netflix can afford to offer a wide variety of content for a small monthly fee, without any ads, and spend money on content creation; but digital TV stations somehow don't make enough money off…

[flagged]

Chomsky on advertising:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfIwUlY44CM

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYoKRS_eWZY

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