Lenovo Ideacentre - how to start on power application?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 2024-10-17 at 17:10 +0200, Bo Berglund wrote:
> it seems like it is only available as a Windows-10 download (they call
> it Operating System Version)....
> It is ages since I even started the PC into Windows so I do not
> remember the login anymore, hopefully I can guess it...

Hi,

it's a PITA, fortunately all my mobos allow to update the firmware by
the BIOS/UEFI thingy, I just need a fat partition on a drive (USB or
SSD/HDD), but I cannot update the firmware of my SSDs anymore. Almost
all SSDs provided Linux support when I bought them, but Linux support
was discontinued a while ago.

I don't care much about the discontinued support regarding the firmware,
since there are unlikely any updates anymore, but if I want to take the
SSDs out of service and make them unreadable, then I also need something
from the vendor that no longer exists. 

I suspect that a VM cannot be used in your case. OTOH I updated the
firmware of one of my musical instrument keyboards using Windows running
in a VM on a Linux host,
https://studiologic-music.com/support/numa_compact2/ , presumably this
cannot work if you want to update the BIOS/UEFI firmware.

However, since you forgot the password of your Windows install, you can
install Windows 10 or 11 on your machine, even without activation and
run the update from the Windows that isn't activated.

FWIW for my Windows installs running in a VM on a Linux host I got a
company activation for free as in beer from some Chinese source for my
Windows 10 VM and a valid code to activate my Windows 11 VM with a new
generated user account for around €5. It could certainly have happened
that the around €5 licence could have been a scam, but that isn't the
case.

Regards,
Ralf