Since you have to hunt around different Lenovo sites (and other sites) to find out about these softwares, I decided to make a post to get feedback from actual Yoga owners on how these programs interact, what they do, which ones are prerequisite, and which ones are unnecessary. Please don't take this as a blanket answer. This is just what I have found. It might be right - it might be wrong. I'm looking for others to post their experiences as well.

Lenovo System Interface Foundation Driver - Necessary prerequisite (missing driver in device manager without it). It allows the Lenovo Utility and Lenovo Companion to work.

Lenovo Yoga Mode Control - Necessary if you want to use your yoga to seemlessly change between all the different modes (laptop, tablet, tent, stand). This software is responsible for autorotating and putting Windows into tablet mode.

Lenovo Utility - Recommended(?) This one I'm not too sure on. I remember that I was missing some function that I wanted but I can't remember what it was now. Maybe battery cycle count and health?

Lenovo Companion - I don't have this one installed and don't think it's necessary but would like someone else to shed some light here.

Lenovo SIF: Agreed, it's required for their other software.

Yoga Mode Control - Not actually necessary from my experience. I have the service stopped because it uses 3 - 5% of one core at all times. When I fold the laptop into tent, tablet, or keyboard-facing-down (stand?) mode, the keyboard and touchpad still get disabled (sometimes takes 3 or 5 seconds). I don't ever want Windows 10 Tablet-mode becuase of how it hides the desktop, but I think it would still enter Tablet Mode if I wanted. Also, auto-rotation still fully works. I've had YMC disabled for over a week and I use all 4 "yoga poses". The only thing that YMC being disabled seems to do is: the onscreen keyboard won't pop up automatically when you enter a text-input field. I don't mind since it's easy enough to touch the keyboard icon in the notification area. Oh also, I think with YMC enabled, you get a little on-screen text when you change modes. These two missing features are not important to me, so I prefer to save the battery life used by the constant draw of of the YMC service and keep it set to manual (I've checked and it never starts itself).

Lenovo Utility: I think some of the options in Lenovo Settings are missing if you don't have Utility installed. Not sure about this, but at one point, Lenovo Settings was missing options for touchpad, camera, battery gauge, etc., and I know that I had the SIF installed. Pretty sure I didn't have Utility installed.

Lenovo Companion: I actually kind of like this app. It has a little hint of bloatware, in that Lenovo kind of advertises new software. But it is a useful app, especially when first setting up Windows, because it downloads the latest drivers and patches. It doesn't force bloatware onto you at all. The layout is pretty slick, too. If you just install Windows 10, then get Lenovo apps on it, then use Companion to install missing drivers, you'll be pretty much set.

Overall, I wouldn't call this Lenovo suite of 4 apps "bloatware". Definitely not as bad as the HP's I've had in the past, and Dell's for that matter. I also don't really care about bloatware since the first thing I do with a new laptop is wipe it and install a different OS. However, I still have the Win10 Home partition that came with this Yoga 720, and a separate partition with Win10 Enterprise. Dual-booting, one for work, one for play. Quite telling of my priorities is the fact that the Enterprise/work partition gets 100GB while Home/play gets the other 850GB.:smileyvery-happy:

Thanks for your reply @snake2332!

That's weird that yours still auto-rotated with YMC disabled/not installed. I didn't think mine worked without it but now I'm second guessing whether I had SIF installed at the time. May have to do some testing.
Good info on Lenovo Companion but since I already have the latest drivers I don't think I'll be installing it.

I actually did an in-place upgrade to 10 Pro which, thankfully, went seamlessly. A little clean up afterwards and you'd never know Home was ever installed. I only have a 256GB SSD so dual-booting would be kinda tight. I've got the 710-14IKB, BTW.

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wrote:

for your reply !

That's weird that yours still auto-rotated with YMC disabled/not installed. I didn't think mine worked without it but now I'm second guessing whether I had SIF installed at the time. May have to do some testing.
Good info on Lenovo Companion but since I already have the latest drivers I don't think I'll be installing it.

 

I actually did an in-place upgrade to 10 Pro which, thankfully, went seamlessly. A little clean up afterwards and you'd never know Home was ever installed. I only have a 256GB SSD so dual-booting would be kinda tight. I've got the 710-14IKB, BTW.

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Yoga 720-15IKB here, btw. And yep it auto-rotates with the YMC service not running. You should see if the process is eating up your CPU a little bit all the time, then set the service to "manual" and stop it, then flip your machine around and you'll see it still works. I've been doing it for more than a week and through multiple reboots.

I have had problems lately where the physical keyboard disables when i fold into tablet pose then won't re-enable when i go back to laptop pose. I'll turn the service back on and see if it still happens (my guess is that it will be solved).

Yoga Mode Control - So it appears that the YMC might also be responsible for the keyboard being disabled/reenabled when folded past 180º.

Thanks @snake2332, please let us know what you find in your testing.

Just bumping this to see if anyone has any more info on these programs/utilities.

Thx!