Y50/ideapad Windows reinstall (remove Superfish.)

The extreme strategy and perhaps most effective method for removing Superfish is to reinstall Windows. I know wipe and install has been mentioned numerous times here in various threads. With the desire for more users to do this, can we collect the necessary information here? (If such a thread already exists, smack me in the head with a search clue bat and point it out to me!) I'll start by listing the URL for downloading the install media from Microsoft.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/create-reset-refresh-media

(You probably need a live account to get it from here. If you find install media elsewhere be sure to verify that it is not an image that has been tampered with. Frying pan... fire.)

I searched for "lenovo y50 drivers" and this was my first hit: http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/pro...enovo-y-series-laptops/y50-70-notebook-lenovo

There is also a package that updates Lenovo drivers which can be found here: http://support.lenovo.com/en/documents/ht080136 I have no idea if it will install missing drivers. It might actually be better if it did not. That would allow users to pick and choose which drivers to install. For example the Lenovo Touchpad driver seems relatively featureless. (I get better feature support on Linux.) When I reinstall, I'll probably go looking for a better Touchpad driver.

It would also be useful to know if *any* of those extra partitions are useful. I think one includes all of the drivers (and possibly the driver updater.) I would prefer to copy that off to a safe location on my file server rather than have it take up space on my laptop SSD. Perhaps related to the extra partitions is the issue of Secure Boot. I'm not sure what needs to be done to accommodate that.

An additional quirk for me and perhaps others is that I dual boot Linux on my laptop. The boot process is presently a bit tortuous. For Windows I just startup and Win8.1 boots. To boot Linux I have to shutdown and press the button to the left of the power button. Then select the Boot menu. Then select the second (hard drive) boot entry. Only then does the Grub menu come up, allowing me to boot Linux Mint. Perhaps there is a better way, but when I got to that point I decided 'good enough' and moved on. Because I normally run Linux I rarely boot Win8.1 so the need to deal with Superfish (which is installed on my Lenovo Y50 purchased in January of 2015) is not urgent.

Thanks!

 

:thud:

Seems to be how this post was received.

Anyway, I did proceed with the reinstall. Instead of going with 8.1 I went with the Windows 10 technical preview. I've been running it in a VM under Linux and find it a lot less aggravating than 8.1. (It still reboots without my permission to install updates, but at least all of the built in apps do not hog the entire screen.)

I'm curious if anyone else is running the Windows 10 preview and if they've found any specific drivers or tweaks that helped. (I did discover that w/out the Realtek sound drivers the audio is impressively bad!)

 

My Y50 is in the mail. I bought a 256G EVO 850 to go with it.
I;ve never tried windows 8. I will use it for a bit as is then install win7.

did you have any trouble finding all the drivers for win10. Support center seems to only have 4 or 5 drivers for Win7 and 8. I would think there would be more. I just wiped my ASUS G73 for resale and Asus support has 20+ drivers for the G73.

 

Not at all. In fact a couple of the drivers popped up a confirm dialog because they were older than the drivers already installed. I suppose one of the things that MS is doing is bundling more drivers with the install media.

The most difficult one which I had to actually search for was the synaptics driver. The one that Lenovo provides has fewer features. (Perhaps that's for a reason. I do notice that things like two finger scroll do not always work. It seems to get 'stuck' frequently.)

I went with a bigger drive (Crucial 512GB M550.) But then I do install two operating systems.

The biggest problem I faced was reclaiming space from the extra partitions. The main partition cannot be resized while Windows is running from it so I did that from Linux. That made Windows unbootable. I might have deleted a partition that is necessary. I found that a new install of Win10 creates three partitions. Surprisingly it also used MBR partitions which confused the Linux Mint installer since its partitioning tool saw the MBR partitions and the remnants of the GPT signature.