Yeah, but its a Dell laptop.
Do they still come covered in Windows stickers and with all sorts of bloatware installed?
Do they still come covered in Windows stickers and with all sorts of bloatware installed?
Or, perhaps, does the ordinary folk/gamer care about bloatware on a laptop this fast, with i5/i7 and 16GB of RAM?
That might be fine if you're buying a Dell. They're easy to get drivers from. (Though, who else has had to deal with those handful of Dells that required a custom Dell build of the Intel PROSet/Wireless software to work? -.-)
But if you bought an ASUS? With the Impossible Website From Hell? HELL NO! Anyone who has had to download a driver or firmware update from their sites will tell you just how unpleasant the experience is (if they can even do it). I swear their webserver's connection to the outside world is a 14.4 modem.
Running a non-ADK/OPK'd Windows install on a modern laptop reminds me a lot of running Linux on a laptop or OEM desktop 15-20 years ago. Hey, anyone remember how fun winmodems were?
It's just not worth the risk. For me, laptops without Apple branding haven't been a sensible choice in a long time, and there was a good half-decade before that where the only serious manufacturer made ThinkPads.
If I have to run windows, its in a VM, and only for cross browser testing purposes.