MJG, you are missing the larger point. *You* would have been able to get UEFI disabled, and *you* would have been able to successfully reconfigure the BIOS settings, and *you* would have found the necessary instructions to get Linux installed, prolly with less than an hour of wasted time undoing the added-at-the-factory-restrictions.
But 'you' and the reviewer 'tony' are not the same person. He says quite explicitly that he bought the box partly because it was shiny, and partly because it had decent specs for the price. He spent days in frustration. He never got it working. The documented instructions did not work as advertised. If you were to translate the mod-guide from russian, and then add a bios shim (ironically from an early article by mjg59 here), and then twirl a chicken around, *then* you -- where 'you' is quite savvy indeed -- can get the ability to boot from usb working again. (It worked at the factory, prior to being disabled via firmware.)
I am in total agreement with a third comment made at amazon.uk -- 31 Jan 2013 16:51:02 GMT, anglo-frenchie says: "Surely the point is why the hell do we need to go through all this nonsense in the first place?" RestrictedBoot-by-default which leads to SecureBoot-after-much-effort-expended-to-undo-restrrictions is *not* the same thing as SecureBoot-plain-and-simple. Mere mortals cannot manage the former, and no big manufacturers will even offer the latter.
Re: Restrictive practices: No it isn't always possible to install Linux !
But 'you' and the reviewer 'tony' are not the same person. He says quite explicitly that he bought the box partly because it was shiny, and partly because it had decent specs for the price. He spent days in frustration. He never got it working. The documented instructions did not work as advertised. If you were to translate the mod-guide from russian, and then add a bios shim (ironically from an early article by mjg59 here), and then twirl a chicken around, *then* you -- where 'you' is quite savvy indeed -- can get the ability to boot from usb working again. (It worked at the factory, prior to being disabled via firmware.)
I am in total agreement with a third comment made at amazon.uk -- 31 Jan 2013 16:51:02 GMT, anglo-frenchie says: "Surely the point is why the hell do we need to go through all this nonsense in the first place?" RestrictedBoot-by-default which leads to SecureBoot-after-much-effort-expended-to-undo-restrrictions is *not* the same thing as SecureBoot-plain-and-simple. Mere mortals cannot manage the former, and no big manufacturers will even offer the latter.