A Journey Through Bloatware: Lenovo Edition
A personal journey through disabling lenovo software and services, including the infamous fn hotkey utility, to remove bloatware, maybe reduce fan noise, and regain control over a clean windows system.
By. Jacob
Edited: 2025-04-14 23:09
I was quite infuriated when Lenovo's Caps Lock popup returned after having initially disabled the relevant Windows service, so I decided to get rid of all Lenovo-related services I could find. I work from the presumption that they are all malware unless something specific breaks by uninstalling them.
Many years ago, the way I would avoid installing most bloatware from the manufacturer was to simply install a clean Windows from an official Microsoft Windows CD or .iso, rather than installing from the OEM recovery partition. This unfortunately no longer seems to work (if it ever fully did), because Windows will happily install malware from the manufacturer on users' devices without their explicit informed consent.
There is no warning dialog box saying:
Do not install Lenovo's "Fn Hotkey Utility" because it may have undesirable side effects, and it's unnecessary because the same functionality is more or less provided by Windows itself.
There really should be this warning, because history tells me that software from the manufacturer has come with undesired side effects. In this case, it was the persistently annoying gigantic Caps Lock notification that Microsoft has repeatedly installed through Windows Update without my consent.
So, when this bullshit happened on my new Lenovo computer, I decided to try disabling as many Lenovo services as I could find, and finally I also managed to delete the Fn Hotkey malware that I have struggled with on and off for years. These services so far include:
- Lenovo Process Management — This process may control something with processor power management, according to the service description, but Windows already has built-in capabilities, so why do we need it? Since there is no proper explanation, I decided to disable it.
- Lenovo Notebook ITS Service — This is related to Intelligent Thermal Solution (ITS), and it should be safe to disable. You might even notice a quieter system when idling. Oddly, my fans would often fire up for seemingly no reason, and I suspect this piece of software is to blame.
- Lenovo Fn and function keys service — I do not think there is any reason for this to be installed. Function keys work anyway. Volume and brightness work. Everything I need seemingly works. AND of course, enabling this will have a very irritating side effect that creates a massive popup on your screen whenever pressing Caps Lock.
Evil Malware from the Manufacturer
I think it is important we remember why we should be careful about installing Lenovo's software on our otherwise clean Windows systems.
It does not really matter what brand of computer you own; I think more or less all the manufacturers out there create and install their own malware of various kinds. Microsoft does this too. E.g., they bundle OneDrive, and it occasionally still re-enables itself after turning it off. They show ads and notifications to the user, and they try to prevent us from using local user accounts. That's just malicious and unwanted. Unfortunately, Microsoft seems to have become more evil.
For manufacturers, I am not sure to what extent this is still a problem, but it used to be that we would trust Microsoft more than the manufacturer.
In recent history, Lenovo has been particularly nasty with the Fn Hot Key tool that shows unwanted popups when pressing Caps Lock and Num Lock (nobody wants that crap). Besides this, and more seriously, they have also been caught installing an actual "Superfish" backdoor on their computers, so this is why it is extremely important we are still careful (Lenovo is Chinese, by the way).
Years ago, this problem was much, much worse. Manufacturers would bundle crazy adware things like their own Wi-Fi network handling, disk/DVD management tools from third parties, and these things were often worse than the built-in functionality in Windows. E.g., diskmgmt.msc. I wonder what they got out of that — it was probably some kind of deal with those third parties.
Wi-fi and Graphics Bloatware
I don't remember the particular brand of computer I saw it on, but I remember it came with a Wi-Fi discovery tool that had a nice graphical illustration of nearby networks. While this may have looked interesting and "high-tech" at the time, I doubt the accuracy of the illustration, and the usefulness was questionable. Again, I found the built-in Wi-Fi manager in Windows much more useful and clean (which it probably used under the hood anyway).
It's the same with graphics software, which might come bloated with duplicated functionality that's already available in Windows. In fact, I probably would not even want to install the official AMD or Nvidia software, because installing the driver is enough, and the control panels from both AMD and Nvidia tends to be clumsy and slow, duplicating functionality already available in Windows. Don't install such things unless you got specific reason to do so.
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