The force that should prevent customer-hostile behaviour is brand reputation, and risk of lawsuits. Unfortunately, the unit profit from the sale of a Dell or a Lenovo laptop is at or below zero, while the fixed costs remain incredibly high. So the business changes. The vendor fights for survival, and both QA and long-term thinking have been brought to the chopping block.<p>The only to win this game, both for producers and consumers, is not to play. Don't let a company that sells shitty PCs install software for you.
At work we use quite a few Dell laptops.<p>If I had the time, I would install Windows from scratch on each and every machine anyway, just to get rid of the insane amounts of, uh, stuff that typically come preinstalled on machines these days.<p>But the only cases where I could justify the effort were machines for our automation people, because those came with Windows 8/8.1 preinstalled, and currently, Siemens only supports their Simatic/WinCC software on Windows 7.<p><i>Sigh</i> Does anybody know of an easy way to remove this certificate?<p>I seriously would like to know what's in it for Dell. I mean, creating the certificate and putting it into their install images meant additional work.