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Comment by notaplumber | Hacker News Reader

I don't buy this. Some Acer laptops in the past have required that you set a Supervisor BIOS password in order to change the Secure Boot settings, but after you do that you can set the password to blank to clear it again.

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Good point, this is definitely a thing on some hardware. Still crappy, but not a huge deal breaker.

+1 on the need to set the Supervisor PW in BIOS, otherwise the settings were greyed out. Puzzling indeed, I had to deal with it back some 5 years ago. Definitely found this answer on forums rather than from mfgr suport pages/docs.

However in this case it may be a different "lockdown" issue, though quite an odd choice reasoning-wise.

With this machine, if purchased from Amazon, the settings remain greyed out even if you set the Supervisor PW. That is not the case if you buy it elsewhere.

You can do that on this laptop if you don’t buy it from Amazon. There are plenty of YouTube videos showing how. If you but it from Amazon, like I did, you can set/change BIOS passwords, but Secure Boot cannot be changed and you cannot add a USB drive to the boot order. I spent hours trying to find a workaround.

Even if this is the case, it's still terrible that such unintuitive, undiscoverable behavior (1) isn't documented as being the case, and (2) isn't known and explained by their tech support. And why would it only work like this if you bought from Amazon?

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