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what happens if I tampered the serial number in the bios of a laptop? This laptop was issued to us by our company and what happened was we were laid out without any compensation for what happened so I decided to keep this laptop however after installing windows OS it was frozen because it was reported as stolen or lost, Is there a way to bypass this? I successfully made a reset in the BIOS admin password and now this is my current problem. By the way the handset was HP elitebook 840 g8

pao
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  • Try it? If you managed to install Windows, at which point did it freeze? Did you connect it to the network? Maybe use it for Linux ... – secfren Apr 15 '23 at 12:13
  • it works fine with ubuntu, but for windows it won't stop in freezing everytime i reinstall a clean copy of windows. I also found out that it was equipped with absolute computrace persistence and several sources mentioned that once the computrace is enabled it can't be disable even with reflashing. however i'll still try to change the serial number as I generated several serial numbers from the orig serial number. – pao Apr 15 '23 at 12:50
  • I am also thinking about blocking the IP addresses of Absolute's servers to prevent it from communicating with the computer. Any ideas regarding this issue would be a great help. – pao Apr 15 '23 at 12:53
  • At which point during install does it freeze? Early or later on when the network is accessed? And what does freeze mean? Error message, bluescreen, ...? You could block access to the servers with a firewall or check with something like Wireshark what connections are made during the setup. You could also try to edit the BIOS with something like UEFITool and remove computrace. – secfren Apr 15 '23 at 14:34
  • after about an hour being connected to the internet, it displays a white screen which says device-freeze and a text indicating it was reported as stolen or lost and then onwards even after restarting, the device-freeze is the first screen that is displayed. I can still access the BIOS setup though – pao Apr 15 '23 at 14:45
  • What happens if you don't connect it to the internet (maybe reinstall required?) or use a firewall? – secfren Apr 15 '23 at 16:33
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    after being frozen, I need to perform a clean install of windows and if I don't connect it at the internet at all it doesn't freeze, maybe I should use a firewall to block the communication between the laptop and the servers of Absolute Software Corp. – pao Apr 15 '23 at 16:59

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