I was recently regifted a new laptop in the box. Now, I know it’s not the best, top of the line deal. I think they said it was a couple hundred bucks. I know it’s a Chinese make and I can’t really find the maker anywhere. The manual is mostly Chinese except for the first two pages as well as the tech specs.
My question is as follows. I know that people have said that certain tech products from foreign countries can end up running certain scripts or program routines once you hook them up to your network. I’ve read that most of them are for data collection. Nevertheless, it still makes me nervous. Is there anything I can do, short of a fresh install, that’ll alleviate my worries?
I know it’s not the best, but it’ll be great for emails, browsing and such. What do you all think..
if you are worried about preloaded malware, your best bet is to wipe it, fully format the disk (Maybe even delete any partition as well in case they have a hidden partition with malware waiting on it), and install a clean instance of windows from an outside source you trust. otherwise you can try to hunt down and run every virus scanner, malware removal tool etc on the existing instance and hope you catch everything.
Personally I would probably just do a windows recovery wipe and do a malware scan. If I was really worried I would go make a bootable drive of Kali Linux and run clamAV from it to scan for malware as well.
It seems like the best bet would be to wipe it. I just need to find an image. Man.. I haven’t re-installed an operating system in a very, very long time
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fradiger
(the world is a beautiful cat and i must meow meow meow)
6
the specs on that are horrendous, so the word ‘couple’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that price tag
In terms of security, you can likely rule out anything extreme unless you’re moonlighting as a nation state surveillance target. However, it’s common for cheaper devices like this to use cracked/non-genuine windows versions which have the potential to contain malware. Your simple two steps are:
#1 completely wipe the drive (i’d recommend a tool like DBAN) #2 reinstall your operating system, if you must use windows there are methods to activate it for free (massgrave’s microsoft activation scripts), otherwise a great time to explore linux if you’re technically inclined
also I’d personally test some hardware stuff, e.g. an LED is supposed to light up near your webcam when it’s in use, otherwise I’d grab a privacy cover for it
It would honestly do better as a Linux based system as the kernel is way smaller and less resource hungry. I’m actually surprised that has a modern windows OS on it.
Otherwise you’re probably fine. Wipe and rebuild it but it’ll do light browser tasks and junk
That’s really all I was gonna use it for. Emails, browsing, shoppin an such. While I used to be relatively uptodate with tech standards, I’m way past it now.
It’s really just about finding a clean, uptodate, preferably free image to install from.
1 Like
fradiger
(the world is a beautiful cat and i must meow meow meow)
10
if you are set on windows, use an official windows 11 ISO from microsoft and then google around for the activation scripts
otherwise i’d recommend linux mint as a simple distro that just works for the basic stuff, you’ll likely reinstall it once every few years anyway
I don’t know if those specs meet the minimum for windows 11 to be honest… you can bypass that stuff and make it work but by default I’m pretty sure win11 will fight you if you try to install it on that system
Anyone wanna clean it up for me? I’m currently selling some jojo’s, I could be persuaded to compensate ya for your time.
I just don’t really have The stuff here that would make facilitating that easier. Another box to work from, external storage to make it all easier, etc..
Yeah. I like that idea. Depending on how far someone’s willing to go. I mean, I got a fair share of yo-yos. Software?? Maybe even some hardware upgrades for more yo-yos? I dunno. Thinking outloud.
Check the Startup folder to see if anything fishy is there. Obviously something more advanced would be a bit more hidden, but there’s probably a bunch of bloatware that starts up that you don’t want.
I’d do a fresh install anyways just to get rid of Win11.
I use this to activate Windows via CMD (Win10 Professional) it’s a Volume key so it should still work:
sometimes I just can’t help myself.