The manager who approved this need to be fired. Programs need to ask permission to the user before installing, especially when they're not device drivers.

This is literal malware and there's also a chance that it might be exploited (example: a mitm Attack exchanges the file that armory crate is downloading)

This kind of Easter egg is not funny at all, developers must avoid undocumented time bombs. I still remember that day 15 years ago when I turned on my Wii and it said that the system files were corrupted. After hours of reverting a full nand backup via bootmii (and losing 2 years of game saves) it turned out that it was a funny April's fool by crediar, which put a fake system corruption message when you run his program on April 1st. Problem is that his program was a loader for the system menu so it was unavoidable if you didn't know that.

Like me, there must be someone paranoid that saw that black bar on the screen, saw a weird Christmas.exe running on their system, and starting wiping or restoring old images to "clean" that.

the wreath has a memory leak

modern app design and its consequences

WDYM "malware like"? It is malware.

Another reason to not buy any Asus stuff.

"do not panic – your device is not compromised."

meme(always has been)

Now ask the non-Christians need to do a class action lawsuit lol

When you turn on your PC and notice that there’s a huge Christmas banner on your desktop, do not panic – your device is not compromised.

Hah, well a vendor just pushed unapproved executable to the device and ran it without consent. Under any definition or other context it's definitely compromised.

If it's unwanted, disruptive, and (allegedly) impacts performance, that's not "malware-like". It's malware.

Somebody should create a windows executable to be placed in the WPBT that silently install Linux on first windows boot....

It is a part of the ASUS Armoury Crate software that is pre-installed on some ASUS PCs.

Always flash new OS if you buy a computer.