Changing Home Page in Lenovo Laptop

Recently I bought a Lenovo Edge 15 laptop. This is first time ever I bought a Lenovo machine. So far I have been Dell guy. This time I just needed something off the shelf without having to wait for Dell to ship custom configured laptop. As far as Edge 15 is concerned, there is nothing wrong with. But there is one annoying feature that seems to be common to all Lenovo machine.

The home page for Internet Explorer is set to Lenovo's cobranded MSN page. I do not want to see MSN home page every time I start IE. I try to keep my home page to either blank tab or Google's search page. There is a standard way to change default home page from internet explorer's options menu. But that did not seem to work in this case. Every time I will change the default home page in settings, next start of IE will bring it back to Lenovo branded MSN page.

After some digging around, I found that Lenovo installs a service named Lenovo Browser Guard. The intent of this service is to prevent any virus or spyware to alter the settings for IE's options. The intention of the service seems to be noble but not everybody wants to see MSN page as their default page. I thought I could uninstall this software from Programs menu. But no. The service does not show up in installed list of programs. The is just outright unethical of vendor to prevent a user from removing something that they do not want.

From task manage I figured out in which folder this service was installed. There I found an executable named Uninstall. Bingo. Double clicked on it and the service was gone forever. After that I changed default home page to what I wanted and it never switched back to Lenovo branded MSN home page.

Location of Lenovo Browser Guard service folder is either C:\Program Files (x86)\LenovoBrowserGuard or C:\Program Files\LenovoBrowserGuard depending on flavor of Windows operating system installed on your machine. Under one of the sub-folder in that folder you will find Uninstall utility for this service.