Hi Matt, as I had mentioned in the email, the freeze was done in absolute which is baked into the BIOS and is common in corporate devices. This device was eWasted before I joined Mastercard, but I can ensure you were far more thorough now with removing the laptops from absolute before they are picked up by our vendor. Hopefully this provides clarity on what a device freeze is in case anyone else runs into this situation.
I have absolute in bios settings. It's interesting that one can enable it, or disable it- there is a third option, in which it is disabled permanently without any way to re-enable it 😂
The fact that the eBay seller helped resolve a recent issue from a device sold 4 years ago is amazing on its own. I prefer to check if Computrace is enabled or not on the device as otherwise it's a brick in my eyes. I mean sure, it doesn't matter to me as I daily drive Linux but, what if I need to install Windows for a quick moment on a second partition? That's where the issue stems.
I think you should include the seller's link somewhere, I'm interested to looks through their stuff and keep them in mind for any future purchases if this is the kind of customer service they provide.
Glad to hear the lock has been lifted! This seems to be a really big problem (with lots of managed iPads in particular). Shame this leads to so many legitimately-acquired but unusable devices on the second hand market.
My company does this too - we have a Mobile Device Manager (MDM) for iOS devices and Lenovo / HP laptops. Someone must have done a bulk import of previously purchased serial numbers for this to happen YEARS later. Glad to hear you got it resolved.
Your Ubuntu won't dual boot because you need to install Windows first, then Ubuntu. Windows Boot Manager always formats efi partition responsible for dual-booting, simply saying
Windows won't format partitions unless you tell it to. All it does upon installation is add itself to the EFI partition and make a UEFI boot entry. It's up to you to change the boot priority back to Ubuntu and setup grub for dual boot. This advice also applies to when Windows updates. You simply just change the UEFI boot entry back to Linux.
Glad to hear the follow up but it was an interesting experience. I've done the same with old macs that are icloud locked or management locked machines which you can tend to get really cheap. If you decide to do more linux great, if not that's also fine. I enjoyed the story nonetheless.
Ive refurbished tons of laptops and a majority of what you find are from resellers that buy up decommissioned or abandoned hardware from companies and bulk sell them. A few will have security locks like computrace nothing you can do its the job of the admin at the company to take care of that but because of laziness they just dump it as is. At that point its a paper weight and all you can do is dump it or try and part it out.
A happy ending. So IS it finally cleared? I forget. Also the other video when I clicked, my imagination was more conspiratorial in nature thinking of some 1984 scenario. Honestly glad that wasnt the case. Happy for you! Cheers
matt it seems like you know just as much as i do with computers do not try to install wine its a app that allows you to run windows apps on Linux wine is a nightmare i tried to install a few years ago and you have to tell wine where your USB ports are so wine can utilize them then about a month ago i tried to install again and the terminal say that the app did install successfully but when i typed the directory in the command prompt to open and it says that command doesn't exist or app isnt installed but the wine config command works it will bring up the settings for wine Linux is just a complete nightmare to use
Glad your issue was resolved. Whether the device was stolen or not,you were the victim here-of corporate stupidity. I once bought a laptop in a thrift store that did a similar thing and after some attempts to alleviate the problem,I just trashed it. I am not about to spend money to ship a laptop to someone who says it is theirs and hires a big corporation to hound innocents.
If you want to run Krita, you might want to use a distro that has orientation towards KDE. I Krita works on OpenSuse, which I use as I like the GUI system admin tool. But Kubuntu (the KDE flavored Ubuntu) and KDE Neon, are also possibilities. I have success running Picture Window Pro under Wine, but if you're dual-booting, Wine is likely pointless.
most distros come built in with grub and automatically find your windows install. if you install ubuntu or something, when it boots up should come with a selector to choose whether you want to use windows or linux. the only issue is with touch is that you need a USB keyboard connected to switch OSes, which if that's not your thing, is completely understandable, I wouldn't want to do that either lmao however you can edit the windows boot manager to show windows or linux with some effort.
Honestly though if you're happy using windows you should stay on windows, absolutely nothing wrong with that, but if you liked your experience with linux then it would be cool to have another user, even if you're just linux-curious :p I mean plenty of cheap computers out there to experiement with, and sticking an extra drive in your PC could be fun idk.
So what you bought was a company laptop, obviously they are supposed to remove any storage and memory sticks. Someone obviously failed to secure the hardware and unlock it.
1 mint sucks and is overrated 2 he tried it and it didn't work. What's wrong with you mint fanboys. Are you going to bruteforce everyone into jumping on your distro? Are you guys that desperate? So many noobs end up trying it and complain till they get Ubuntu that solves there problems and you never mention these times when you do your daily canonical hate rants. Stop recommending mint
Glad it worked out but Don’t be a lazy Consoomer and take this as a warning to move away from both Windows and Apple OSs. They’ll take privacy, ownership at everything else if they can these Corporations. We are not Cattle for them to cull when they please. Had to say it:) Good luck with everything.
As I said before, I hate that TPM garbage. Companies with far too much bureaucracy will "accidentally" invalidate old machines they sold off and it's far more common than you know. If you watched a certain RUclipsr that I won't promote anymore, then you'd already have known of this problem and it's why I don't buy used all-in-ones. Also, why I quoted the word accidentally there is because I don't consider negligence an accident. If a multi-billion dollar company is careless, it can lead to a loss of money or life, and neither is good. I'm not saying every single time, but in the majority of cases, such as selling off old computers with TPM because UEFI doesn't suck enough. There have been companies that refused to help, and thankfully they helped you, but it shouldn't be necessary because as I said in my other comment it's going too far in a wasted effort to prevent theft which it won't prevent anyway. Not that you'll care, but if you did make more Linux content you'd get more subscribers and potentially make some money with RUclips. I think the reason why so many people, such as yourself, tend to reject Linux is because things are done in a completely different way and you need a different mindset to do things that way. I frequently hear people complain about GIMP who came from using PhotoShop because either or both of two things, the CMYK support and the keybindings. No one wants to spend a couple of hours changing keybindings, but there are profiles you can download to change them all to the PhotoShop bindings in one step. So if you don't care about CMYK, and unless you're doing it for printing purposes you probably shouldn't, then I'd suggest downloading a different profile and trying GIMP again. Also, because a lot of BIOS's these days implement that boot from a particular partition feature, you probably don't need to worry as much about GRUB. I've got it installed on my desktop, but it's actually completely unnecessary because the BIOS can select the boot partition and if I ever have a problem booting up I've got numerous boot USB's laying about. However, I don't use Windows, and I currently only have two versions of Linux to boot into, one of which I never use.
If I discovered one of my devices was locked up, and useless because one of the largest corporations in the world is claiming that the device belongs to them sans proof, yeah, you could definitely say I was having a bad day!!! Me being pissed-off about one of the largest corporations in the world, and not only large, but also criminally nefarious in my opinion, who delusively believes that a piece of my property belongs to them, and further, insanely thinks they have the right to adopt the attitude of "Well, if I can't use it, then no one can!", and essentially render my device nonfunctional/unusable under the claim that it is their property sans proof, provides no logical reasoning to then infer that I am most assuredly a sad and hateful person. I'm positive that to make his point the most effective, he broke down the reasoning behind such a claim to illustrate that there does exist some evidence that supports such a statement, instead of merely making the claim with no supporting evidence, and therefore, making the claim itself appear to be utter lunacy, as if he had just pulled it right out of his @$$!!!
Hi Matt, as I had mentioned in the email, the freeze was done in absolute which is baked into the BIOS and is common in corporate devices. This device was eWasted before I joined Mastercard, but I can ensure you were far more thorough now with removing the laptops from absolute before they are picked up by our vendor. Hopefully this provides clarity on what a device freeze is in case anyone else runs into this situation.
I have absolute in bios settings. It's interesting that one can enable it, or disable it- there is a third option, in which it is disabled permanently without any way to re-enable it 😂
The fact that the eBay seller helped resolve a recent issue from a device sold 4 years ago is amazing on its own. I prefer to check if Computrace is enabled or not on the device as otherwise it's a brick in my eyes. I mean sure, it doesn't matter to me as I daily drive Linux but, what if I need to install Windows for a quick moment on a second partition? That's where the issue stems.
How to check? " if Computrace is enabled or not on the device"
@@aperson1181 There should be an option in the BIOS setup, under security.
I think you should include the seller's link somewhere, I'm interested to looks through their stuff and keep them in mind for any future purchases if this is the kind of customer service they provide.
great idea
This would be great
Glad to hear the lock has been lifted! This seems to be a really big problem (with lots of managed iPads in particular). Shame this leads to so many legitimately-acquired but unusable devices on the second hand market.
My company does this too - we have a Mobile Device Manager (MDM) for iOS devices and Lenovo / HP laptops. Someone must have done a bulk import of previously purchased serial numbers for this to happen YEARS later. Glad to hear you got it resolved.
"I reinstalled XP so many times that I remember the product key" Me too.
Nice to see that some small patches of integrity still exist although the time consumed dealing with this hassle is reprehensible.
Glad to see you got things figured out
I've started watching your cycling videos which are great.
Wow, thanks!
Glad you got it sorted.
Your video was quite the talk internally ;-)
Your Ubuntu won't dual boot because you need to install Windows first, then Ubuntu. Windows Boot Manager always formats efi partition responsible for dual-booting, simply saying
this. follow dell's instructions for this bc it's the easiest way to do it and it's all on one page and they did a good job
Windows won't format partitions unless you tell it to. All it does upon installation is add itself to the EFI partition and make a UEFI boot entry. It's up to you to change the boot priority back to Ubuntu and setup grub for dual boot.
This advice also applies to when Windows updates. You simply just change the UEFI boot entry back to Linux.
You can install windows after but there's some additional stuff you need to do to make it dual bootable
@@R4dm1n Perhaps Windows could simply NOT DO THAT? Why does it change Boot Entries in the first place?
This
Glad to hear the follow up but it was an interesting experience. I've done the same with old macs that are icloud locked or management locked machines which you can tend to get really cheap. If you decide to do more linux great, if not that's also fine. I enjoyed the story nonetheless.
"thank you for your negative comments" is a phrase you never expect to hear on youtube haha
Ive refurbished tons of laptops and a majority of what you find are from resellers that buy up decommissioned or abandoned hardware from companies and bulk sell them. A few will have security locks like computrace nothing you can do its the job of the admin at the company to take care of that but because of laziness they just dump it as is. At that point its a paper weight and all you can do is dump it or try and part it out.
Great Dust Bowl 100 shirt!
Coming back next year, awesome race1
A happy ending. So IS it finally cleared? I forget. Also the other video when I clicked, my imagination was more conspiratorial in nature thinking of some 1984 scenario. Honestly glad that wasnt the case. Happy for you! Cheers
Oldee HP printers are just bulletproof, even their older inkjets are pretty good, grandma has a 1990s Deskjet, still going strong!
I wonder how Haiku OS would run on this…
matt it seems like you know just as much as i do with computers do not try to install wine its a app that allows you to run windows apps on Linux wine is a nightmare i tried to install a few years ago and you have to tell wine where your USB ports are so wine can utilize them then about a month ago i tried to install again and the terminal say that the app did install successfully but when i typed the directory in the command prompt to open and it says that command doesn't exist or app isnt installed but the wine config command works it will bring up the settings for wine Linux is just a complete nightmare to use
Glad your issue was resolved. Whether the device was stolen or not,you were the victim here-of corporate stupidity. I once bought a laptop in a thrift store that did a similar thing and after some attempts to alleviate the problem,I just trashed it. I am not about to spend money to ship a laptop to someone who says it is theirs and hires a big corporation to hound innocents.
I'd be interested in more content around devices that can be remotely disabled. It will be coming to cars in thr USA soon!
Hi, Matt :-) Thank you for the video 🙏 Any chance you could share the link of the Links tech Ebay seller?
Yes, been meaning to do that. www.ebay.com/str/prolinefix
If you want to run Krita, you might want to use a distro that has orientation towards KDE. I Krita works on OpenSuse, which I use as I like the GUI system admin tool. But Kubuntu (the KDE flavored Ubuntu) and KDE Neon, are also possibilities. I have success running Picture Window Pro under Wine, but if you're dual-booting, Wine is likely pointless.
any of these locks are on the BIOS level so anything you do with the SSD isn't gonna matter.
Great ebay seller there.
most distros come built in with grub and automatically find your windows install. if you install ubuntu or something, when it boots up should come with a selector to choose whether you want to use windows or linux. the only issue is with touch is that you need a USB keyboard connected to switch OSes, which if that's not your thing, is completely understandable, I wouldn't want to do that either lmao
however you can edit the windows boot manager to show windows or linux with some effort.
Honestly though if you're happy using windows you should stay on windows, absolutely nothing wrong with that, but if you liked your experience with linux then it would be cool to have another user, even if you're just linux-curious :p I mean plenty of cheap computers out there to experiement with, and sticking an extra drive in your PC could be fun idk.
@@JessicaFEREM thanks for the tips
If you need to go back to Linux, you may get some windows programmes running under wine; a windows emulator. It's very good
So what you bought was a company laptop, obviously they are supposed to remove any storage and memory sticks. Someone obviously failed to secure the hardware and unlock it.
which seller did you buy it from, I'm interested to buy also
after smashing the like button.....it broke 😭
....am not that heavy handed....😢
it's a very fragile button
Why Ubantu, not Mint?
1 mint sucks and is overrated 2 he tried it and it didn't work. What's wrong with you mint fanboys. Are you going to bruteforce everyone into jumping on your distro? Are you guys that desperate? So many noobs end up trying it and complain till they get Ubuntu that solves there problems and you never mention these times when you do your daily canonical hate rants. Stop recommending mint
Glad it worked out but Don’t be a lazy Consoomer and take this as a warning to move away from both Windows and Apple OSs.
They’ll take privacy, ownership at everything else if they can these Corporations.
We are not Cattle for them to cull when they please.
Had to say it:)
Good luck with everything.
As I said before, I hate that TPM garbage. Companies with far too much bureaucracy will "accidentally" invalidate old machines they sold off and it's far more common than you know. If you watched a certain RUclipsr that I won't promote anymore, then you'd already have known of this problem and it's why I don't buy used all-in-ones. Also, why I quoted the word accidentally there is because I don't consider negligence an accident. If a multi-billion dollar company is careless, it can lead to a loss of money or life, and neither is good. I'm not saying every single time, but in the majority of cases, such as selling off old computers with TPM because UEFI doesn't suck enough. There have been companies that refused to help, and thankfully they helped you, but it shouldn't be necessary because as I said in my other comment it's going too far in a wasted effort to prevent theft which it won't prevent anyway.
Not that you'll care, but if you did make more Linux content you'd get more subscribers and potentially make some money with RUclips. I think the reason why so many people, such as yourself, tend to reject Linux is because things are done in a completely different way and you need a different mindset to do things that way. I frequently hear people complain about GIMP who came from using PhotoShop because either or both of two things, the CMYK support and the keybindings. No one wants to spend a couple of hours changing keybindings, but there are profiles you can download to change them all to the PhotoShop bindings in one step. So if you don't care about CMYK, and unless you're doing it for printing purposes you probably shouldn't, then I'd suggest downloading a different profile and trying GIMP again.
Also, because a lot of BIOS's these days implement that boot from a particular partition feature, you probably don't need to worry as much about GRUB. I've got it installed on my desktop, but it's actually completely unnecessary because the BIOS can select the boot partition and if I ever have a problem booting up I've got numerous boot USB's laying about. However, I don't use Windows, and I currently only have two versions of Linux to boot into, one of which I never use.
lol who cares about the seller, they made a mistake, not on purpose.
If I discovered one of my devices was locked up, and useless because one of the largest corporations in the world is claiming that the device belongs to them sans proof, yeah, you could definitely say I was having a bad day!!! Me being pissed-off about one of the largest corporations in the world, and not only large, but also criminally nefarious in my opinion, who delusively believes that a piece of my property belongs to them, and further, insanely thinks they have the right to adopt the attitude of "Well, if I can't use it, then no one can!", and essentially render my device nonfunctional/unusable under the claim that it is their property sans proof, provides no logical reasoning to then infer that I am most assuredly a sad and hateful person.
I'm positive that to make his point the most effective, he broke down the reasoning behind such a claim to illustrate that there does exist some evidence that supports such a statement, instead of merely making the claim with no supporting evidence, and therefore, making the claim itself appear to be utter lunacy, as if he had just pulled it right out of his @$$!!!