3 ms·

More likely, it's a conspiracy against Win7/Win8 users, which hurts Linux users as collateral damage. What likely happened was the ms/lenovo deal was "And Lenov

by beagle3 10y ago

More likely, it's a conspiracy against Win7/Win8 users, which hurts Linux users as collateral damage. What likely happened was the ms/lenovo deal was "And Lenovo will make sure win7 and win8 are not supported on laptop", which lenovo solved by switching the hard drive to a mode not even win10 supports, locking it that way (that's the evil part), and putting drivers for it on the lenovo install media, which are win10 only. Thus, this laptop can only ever be installed from the Lenovo win10 media. No win7, no win8, no retail win10 (for now), and .... probably as a (not unwelcome) side effect, no linux. Still, just as evil and despicable.

deviate_X 10y ago
The problem with this conspiracy is that you can't install Windows 10 on the machine either ...
- beagle3 10y ago
  From retail/downloaded Win10. Buy you CAN from Lenovo images, which are provided to you by Lenovo.
josteink 10y ago
Except windows 10s drivers are compatible with windows 8 and 7, since the driver model haven't changed since then. So using that install media you can extract the drivers and install older windows versions anyway. So it's a pretty crappy conspiracy :)
- tunap 10y ago
  To clarify, the extracted drivers will load for 7/8/8.1 without editing an inf file?
  - josteink 10y ago
    I'm speaking of Windows drivers in general. I can't make any specific guarantees for these particular drivers, but I don't see why they should be different.
  - edoceo 10y ago
    You will have lots of manual digging to find the right drivers and will likely need to edit inf files. The API/ABI for drivers didn't change between 7,8,10
- beagle3 10y ago
  Not at all. To be effective, it doesn't need to stop a very determined user (as evidence, someone reflashed the bios so they could install Linux). And it does effectively stop users from installing Linux, Win7, Win8 and even Win10 - except from the provided Lenovo install media; which makes Microsoft happy (no Win7/Win8) and Lenovo happy (full control of installed versions).

by beagle3 10y ago

deviate_X 10y ago

The problem with this conspiracy is that you can't install Windows 10 on the machine either ...

beagle3 10y ago
From retail/downloaded Win10. Buy you CAN from Lenovo images, which are provided to you by Lenovo.

josteink 10y ago

Except windows 10s drivers are compatible with windows 8 and 7, since the driver model haven't changed since then. So using that install media you can extract the drivers and install older windows versions anyway. So it's a pretty crappy conspiracy :)

tunap 10y ago
To clarify, the extracted drivers will load for 7/8/8.1 without editing an inf file?
- josteink 10y ago
  I'm speaking of Windows drivers in general. I can't make any specific guarantees for these particular drivers, but I don't see why they should be different.
- edoceo 10y ago
  You will have lots of manual digging to find the right drivers and will likely need to edit inf files. The API/ABI for drivers didn't change between 7,8,10
beagle3 10y ago
Not at all. To be effective, it doesn't need to stop a very determined user (as evidence, someone reflashed the bios so they could install Linux). And it does effectively stop users from installing Linux, Win7, Win8 and even Win10 - except from the provided Lenovo install media; which makes Microsoft happy (no Win7/Win8) and Lenovo happy (full control of installed versions).