On 3/7/21 11:03 AM, Celejar wrote:
There are, however, disadvantages as well (besides the fact that anything used involves some risk): these types of machines can have proprietary and non-standard aspects. E.g., I wasted a great deal of time (and some money) during deployment of my Z440 when I made the fatal decision to enable Secure Boot in the BIOS. When Secure Boot is enabled, the system will fail to boot if it finds peripherals not in a whitelist. The Z440 has no onboard graphics, and the consumer RX-570 I had installed was definitely not on the whitelist, so the machine refused to boot, and I couldn't disable Secure Boot without graphics output. (Even blindly resetting CMOS may not work, since HP flashes a code on the screen which you have to enter via the keyboard to confirm changes, at least under certain circumstances.) I eventually wound up spending $13 for a Nvidia NVS 315 that was on the whitelist, and then another $8 for a DMS-59 adapter to make the thing work with a normal monitor ...
Interesting story. I have encountered baffling engineering by HP more than once over the years, and therefore avoid their products. But, no brand is immune from this effect. My strategy has been "to stay in the middle of the herd" with Intel and Dell products. The issues I encounter are often known and can be solved with Google.
David
