Kevin Karhan Nov 22

I really am pissed about #hp right now.

Cuz I got to service an #t520 #ThinClient - nothing fancy but still.

  • I want to restore the #WindowsEmbeddedStandard7 on it because the previous owner didn't and it's kinda useless without admin privilegues.

  • So I checked on the hp website and found that they "serial-wall" the access to any #WES7 images (propably to appease #Microsoft) behind a prompt to enter the device's serial number.

  • Fortunately, that device was sold & shipped with WES7 and even has a license key, so I enter the one from the devices's label and get told "Serial Number Invalid".

  • I boot the device into it's UEFI to verify things and take a photo of the Serial # displayed there (which is the same but just to be shure I retried.

  • HP still claims the serial # is invalid, and since they won't provide support without a valid serial #, I'm really pissed.

Anyone else had this problem?

  • Is there any way to unfuck this mess??

Cuz I'm pretty shure no reasonable lawyer would take on a case for hardware that sells for €20 on eNay and is 11+ years old by now.

#Windows #Embedded #shitshow

Kevin Karhan Nov 8, 2023

@SirTapTap considering the amount of #scalping of @Raspberry_Pi #RaspberryPi's and the fact that the #Pi5B will lilely not be available at #MSRP until the #Pi6B or #CM5 or #Pi500 get released, I can recommend to take a look at #ThinClients, because they have regular #amd64 #CPU's, plenty of ports, are almost always #fanless and also barely sip power.

I do use some #hp #t520 as #MiniServers to do #backups and #torrent #linux distros and just be things I can offload building OS/1337 to...