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Asus bombards Windows 11 with christmas.exe malware-like Christmas wreath banner
(www.windowslatest.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
According to this article: https://www.techpowerup.com/248827/asus-z390-motherboards-automatically-push-software-into-your-windows-installation it has already installed services on your computer that persist restarts by the time you are prompted to install Armoury Crate. In my opinion that is not acceptable at all.
I understand and respect your preference.
A “power user” is typically going to go through the UEFI/BIOS settings immediately after assembling their machine to configure them to their liking. Having that preference, you likely fall within that category. I would add that, at this point, this practice is about 6 generations old at this point and in use by most motherboard vendors.
As the article mentions, the feature could be considered useful. These products aren’t designed specifically for power users. Having network access and a frictionless path to driver deployment is ultimately beneficial to the majority of consumers who are going to interact with this hardware.
I would completely agree with you if that was what this feature was being used for, however most manufacturers use it to install bloatware instead of drivers which is not acceptable in my opinion.
Not to mention the huge security risk of running exe files at boot up that could be exploited by malicious people. I’m sure manufacturers aren’t releasing a new bios update every time they update their software so old versions could have unpatched vulnerabilities…