I was helping another team at work a couple of years ago, and during the pandemic shortages they had ordered pallets of computers at a time rather than just ordering as needed like they usually did before and after the shortages. I was tasked with babysitting 5 of those laptops which had been sitting in storage for over a year while they applied updates and whatnot.
I kid you not, babysitting those 5 laptops took the entire business day to get up to date (they for whatever reason did not have any flash drives so I couldn’t simply install the latest ISO) and one of the laptops managed to delete all of the keyboard drivers from itself so I had to use the onscreen softkeyboard to attempt to fix it, and ultimately used the manufacturer restore partition to reset it and restart the update process as the cleanest solution
I also got minimal other work done that day as every step of course required some manual intervention on the laptops. I shudder to imagine the scale of lost productivity across the entire world at the hands of Microslop
I use windows like once a year to update some random bios or firmware and it always takes a goddamn long time. I needed to use intel eeupdate to fix wrong checksum on my ghetto cheap intel 10g nic and it took like an hour of update bootloop in my seldom used windows drive. I still have some linux computers using ide drives and its faster to update.
Just use a win pe boot environment.
Won’t work if you need to update something like dell hardware firmware. DUP wont run in a pe environment. Of course you can extract the files but that doesn’t always work. Sometimes you have to boot windows if the manufacturer doesn’t bother to make a linux version for a desktop like they do for all their servers.
Dell has their own instructions on making a bootable usb for bios updates:
Do it the hard way or the easy way. Oh and good luck with a drive update.
