At work, I was issued a new lapdog about 6 months ago.
The old one has sat here ever since, never powered up.
I got a message from the one IT guy, asking for it back to be wiped.
I duly dropped it off, and in the meantime mentioned I had the need of a basic laptop to leave at the flat in Edinburgh.
I offered to pay a nominal amount for it, but that was waved away.
It was wiped, and handed back to me.
I've just installed my own Win11 on it, and it's perfectly useable for the basic needs I have in Edinburgh.
I did need to use my Rufus installer, as the machine doesn't quite meet the somewhat artificial win 11 hardware requirements.
All working well now.
Had to manually install only one Dell driver (see below), everything else either installed from the USB, or picked up from Windows Update once I'd allowed it to connect to the Internet after bypassing the Microsoft Account nonsense. Initial install had 8 unknown devices banged out in Device Mangler. After a round of Windows Updates, only 2 unknown devices banged out in Device Mangler.
Dell support site is quite good. Enter your Service Tag number, and it knows all about your machine.
Let the website download the Support Assist utility, and it will scan the hardware and offer driver updates.
This mostly worked.
Updated 8 of the installed drivers.
It left one device banged out in Device Manager.
Looking at the PCI VendorID and DeviceID, this was a STMicroelectronics 3-axis accelerometer. Intended to detect when you'd dropped the device, and it was about to hit the floor, allowing the software to park the heads of any HDDs before impact.
Going back to the Dell website that declare I was up-to-date, I clicked on the link for all downloads, and found one for this device.
Selecting and installing it made Device Mangler happy, and if it's happy, I'm happy.
Dunno why the Support Assist thingy missed that.
Installed my somewhat historic Office 2016 on it, I've never bothered to download anything more recent.
It's licensed against my slightly shonky KMS server, same as all the kid's PCs, but I didn't say that.
