Welcome to Tech Talk, where we explore all things technology in relation to student life. This week, I bought a new laptop online for a killer deal and it hid some nasty secrets.
Ever see a deal that seems too good to be true? I see them all the time as a tech shopper, especially online. It just so happens that I needed a new laptop and a new desktop. I won’t say where online I bought these computers from, but what I will say is that they were both bought from different sellers.
I’ll start with the laptop; it’s a Lenovo Yoga 7 2-in-1 and I gotta tell you; on paper, it’s fast and can do almost anything you’d want with little or no complaint. So, imagine my surprise when I unbox it, plug it in, turn it on, and see that it’s not at all as good at performing as expected. Other users had no issues, updates worked flawlessly and didn’t take forever, yet my laptop could barely do the same tasks and I couldn’t update the drivers for the video card. This is a problem — a big one. After looking at any programs that were running in the background, I found a ton of non-standard stuff.
Turns out, this great deal was loaded with cryptocurrency miners, the software that allows people to earn cryptocurrency by using their computer to crunch the numbers of the program. There was also an alarming amount of spyware. Both of these aspects explained the lack of performance and why my internet connection was so slow. To compare with the other computer I bought, a mini desktop machine, which has almost the same specifications as the laptop, ran without an issue. There was no bloatware or insidious extras, beyond the ones Microsoft is forcing us to use. I’m looking at you, Copilot.
So what do you do in this case? The best thing to do is go to Microsoft’s website and learn how to make your own recovery key from their clean copy of Windows 11 — which is free as long as you have a system that had it before. You then kiss your files goodbye and fully wipe the hard drive clean. It’s a nuclear option that shouldn’t be used lightly, but it is the only way to make sure your system is safe to use.
After doing this, the laptop will need all the drivers and updates, the software that makes everything work, and once those are done you should be good to go. If you suspect that your new computer isn’t running the way it should, get someone to look at it. Especially if you bought it from a less than recognized store, like I did. In short, there’s no free lunch and when something seems too good to be true, it generally is.
