Mastodawn

I bought a factory refurbish HP Dev One. It’s basically the only laptop designed for Linux made by a big company (i guess it was a project between HP and system76.)

It doesn’t have a windows key, because it was specifically made for Linux, the hardware choices were made based on stability of Linux hardware drivers, etc.

They put windows 11 on it. WTF?

It doesn’t have a bios key for windows, because it isn’t a windows laptop. So someone spent extra money on a digital license for windows home to put on a laptop designed specifically to not have windows on it.

What the shit? I was gonna wipe it for security anyway, but… it’s just baffling.

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Pope Romule Jan 19, 2024

Best guess, laptop was sent back for warranty repair (90B error suggests cooling fan died), and despite HP making a big deal about “training support staff for Pop!_OS” They probably don’t bother training anyone on the RMA repair team.

Staff probably assumed the customer installed Linux, couldn’t find a system specific windows image on the server, and used a generic image instead.

So the key in the photo is probably a MAK bulk activation key used for a generic install. If you need a windows 10/11 home key for any reason try it out, it might be good for a few hundred activations.