What do you make of this? Two years ago I bought a brilliant little Intel 7iBNxx NUC (Next Unit of Computing, in their marketing speak), and used it as my main working PC, married to a big old Dell screen via HDMI, and carrying all my stuff on its internal 500 GB Western Digital SSD and 16 GB of internal memory, plus an assortment of three more Solid State Drives from Seagate, Gigabyte and Corsair...
In its wisdom, Intel decided it needed to 'upgrade the firmware' on my NUC, and of course I let it go ahead. The beautifully executed and visually attractive Visual BIOS appeared upon restarting - BUT I was told there was NO operating system and the system would shut down. Which it did.
Of course I alerted Intel to the strange case, back in November 2020, and never heard back.
I contacted Intel again more recently, explained my case and said would they please fix the problem they had created for me...
Lo and behold, I received a reply, had a support person allocated to my case, who patiently went through all possible options to get me back on-line.
Donald is based in the Phillipines, three hours behind me, and I can't tote up the time he spent on my case, with me duly attached to the effort. It is still not resolved, but on Monday Donald will ring again and expects to arrange for an RMA (Return Materials Authorisation) to be relayed to me.
BUT, here's the rub: Intel had permitted the user to set a master password for the NUC, so I blithely put in admin1, to keep it short and easy to remember. Intel, however, had decreed that passwords needed to consist of at least 8 letters, a figure, and a symbol! So, after three tries with MY little PWD, the system decreed that the password was invalid and duly locked me out!
Haven't yet been able to get out of that hole that I dug for myself!
Yet it would have been so easy for the Intel BIOS programmers to prevent such an occurrence, and save the firm untold man-hours of support time, IF they had merely prevented a hapless user from entering an invalid password (that did not meet their criteria)!
So please do this pronto, Intel - and as a recompense for my useful suggestion, perhaps you can see fit to waive the requirement for an RMA to be accompanied by the original purchase invoice... I simply can't find it in the bordello that is my office!
Otherwise my only option is to put Cinnamon and Firefox on a bootable USB stick, or Kubuntu or whatever, and mount that on the wretched NUC and hope for the best!
Postscript: Intel eventually relented, had me send the NUC to Malaysia, methinks, and reurned a brand-new Intel 7 with the latest O/S to me!
Installing it was child's play - it even imported all of my original stuff from the SSDs...
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