As Lenovo seems to ship preinstalled Windows versions that contain seriously unsecure adware., the standard advice is to reinstall a clean version of windows, as even uninstalling the adware does not remove all things.

But what if all you have is the preinstalled windows crap on a hidden partition? Download a WIndows 8.1 installation media and reinstall a clean version from scratch. Fortunately, there are good websites describing how to do that. (Googling for “download windows 8.1. installation media” leads to the same pages).

So

1. Download the mysterious windows.
2. Download the weird tool to burn an .iso to a DVD (or stick).
3. Reinstall, and you should be fine. Easy, right?

If only, downloading a legal and official installation image from a Microsoft webserver using a program supplied by Microsoft were that easy. I have a 50,000MBit/s DSL connection: The first attempt to download the 3GB .iso file took 48h (reaching some 80% completion) before it failed with “file path invalid” or something like that. Next attempt on a different compter: After only 12h of downloading time, an enforced windows update started an automatic reboot, and all was gone again. Now, the third attempt is running, trying to get those 3GB for the last few hours. I am curious if it will succeed this time.

Seriously Microsoft, could you please put your installation media on a real webserver? Or do you expect people to bittorrent your software, so you don’t provide any download capacity yourself anymore? This is ridiculous, I am just trying to follow to the steps that you recommend me to take.