I hadn’t seen my dad for a whole year - God have mercy on my lazy ass - and now that I was going to see him, he asked me to help him factory reset his laptop (some Lenovo running Microslop). He could’ve done it by himself technically speaking, but he knows that I’m knowledgeable when it comes to tech, so why not.
Oh. My. FUCKING. God.
I hadn’t “used” Microslop Shitdows for five or so years, Windows 10 at the time. I had been following some news - and posts here too - so I knew to expect some bullshit, but…
- It doesn’t let you install without an internet connection PERIOD. I even disabled the wireless NIC in the hopes that it would let me USE THE COMPUTER THAT MY DAD HAD PAID FOR but no. “Install drivers” or “contact support”, it said.
- It doesn’t accept CLI hotkeys. Mkay…
- It (being Lenovo in collaboration with Microslop, I guess, not Microslop on its own) doesn’t allow you to boot from a USB stick. I imaged a USB stick with a Windows 10 ISO, even bought an activation key at Kinguin, but no. Just no. The BIOS doesn’t let you to change boot order, the recovery mode - EVEN THOUGH IT HAS THE OPTION TO BOOT FROM REMOVABLE MEDIA - simply jumps back to the stock installation upon choosing “boot from USB”.
- Finally, after giving up and connecting to the internet, setting up a fake account, it wouldn’t let me proceed unless I turned off my VPN.
Only after having been force fed the Microslop setup, I finally was able to nuke it with Cris Titus’ Windows utility and then setup an offline account.
At least my dad is happy with the laptop. That’s all that matters. I gave him Librewolf with uBlock and Libre Office. And mad respect for him saying before point four above, that he’ll let me slap Linux onto it if nothing else works. 🩵 Which of course wouldn’t work since booting from removable media is disabled in the firmware, but still. Love you dad. 🩷
Rant over.
PS: he did give me permission to unscrew the bottom and have a look inside, so I will try to replace the SSD (if it’s M.2) and possibly flash Libreboot if the model is among their officially supported laptops.
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For #1, it absolutely is possible, but the technique has changed over time. You pretty much have to look it up every time, and check older methods until you find the way that works with the version you’re using. Last I checked you needed to disconnect any NICs, then hit one of the F keys during setup to get to the command prompt, then put in a specific command, then reboot into setup again. Been years though.
For #2, Command Prompt doesn’t because it’s still the same shit it was from the 90s. They have an open source program called Windows Terminal that supports tabs, multiple environments, most of the nice stuff you’d expect from a good Linux Terminal, but they don’t include it by default so you have to install it yourself.
#3 and #4 are pure bullshit. 1 and 2 are as well, but at least they have reasonably reachable workarounds.