That's really good advice but also hard to do because most OEMs stopped providing a reinstall option which doesn't reinstall their bundled software as well.
Here's the ArsTechnica guide for doing a clean install of Windows 8.1 – imagine walking the average home user through this process, even before you factor in discouragements such as the likelihood of tech support blaming any problem more subtle than catching fire on your reinstall:
This, in a nutshell, is a major source of Apple selling so many iOS devices – I regularly hear people say that it's easier to have a good, secure computing experience that way and they're not wrong.
OEMs figured out that they could build a custom recovery image with the bloatware included (including on Windows 8). Windows 10 supposedly lets you delete the package that includes the bloatware, but I haven't tried it.
Windows 8 and 10 also have a lovely feature called the Windows Platform Binary Table. This allows OEMs to write an application into the UEFI, and Windows will automatically deploy to memory and run it with admin privileges each time it boots. The intended use was for installing drivers and anti-theft agents, but of course it was immediately used to drop bloatware/malware. This vector works even on entirely fresh installs, and there is no mitigation except obtaining a clean, signed UEFI image.
Here's the ArsTechnica guide for doing a clean install of Windows 8.1 – imagine walking the average home user through this process, even before you factor in discouragements such as the likelihood of tech support blaming any problem more subtle than catching fire on your reinstall:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/02/save-yourself-from-yo...
This, in a nutshell, is a major source of Apple selling so many iOS devices – I regularly hear people say that it's easier to have a good, secure computing experience that way and they're not wrong.