Brand new laptop has outdated 22H2 and Windows update won't give me an upgrade to 23h2 or 24h2. What to do?

Winuser said:

Reading some of the replies about when the base warranty starts I decided to do a search and found this on the Lenovo site. https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/ht100121

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The Lenovo Vantage App pointed me to the same site and I filled it in with all the details I had of my customer's laptop.

/Mike

MikeWilliams_UK said:

The Lenovo Vantage App pointed me to the same site and I filled it in with all the details I had of my customer's laptop.

/Mike

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Do you have the receipt or invoice of purchase? It should state the Warranty duration which starts from the date of the document. You can confirm that if you call the store and ask.

Winuser said:

IMHO, it' should have been sold at a discount. Would you pay full price for a new car that sat on a lot for years. I know I wouldn't. In fact I bought a new 1988 GMC pickup at the end of the year and saved a couple of thousand dollars.

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Well, if a laptop with similar hardware costs, say 400€ and the model you are buying costs less than 300€, it doesn't need Rocket Science. Something is going on. It is either an old model that they reduced the price to sell it, or a refurbished model (meaning a used one, but sold with Warranty from the Store), or has some flaw, or was on display and they lost its package and possibly some peripherals that were included in the package. It is definitely not a 2025-2026 model sealed package sold at a lower price. Something is fishy... I would examine it thoroughly and decide if I keep it or return to the Store, provided I am covered by Warranty with my receipt of purchase. There are utilities to find out how many hours the disk has been used, so you can tell if it was used before and for how long.

Not to disagree with the previous posters, but in my opinion the easiest way is to just go to the download windows 11 page, download and run the Windows 11 Installation Assistant and you are off to the races. No need for enablement packages or repair installs.

This should work to update to the latest regardless of any outdated old installation, regardless of feature pack. I do it all the time.



I do agree with the rest of people pointing out that buying a machine that outdated is suspicious, and I hope the price was good.

andrew129260 said:

Not to disagree with the previous posters, but in my opinion the easiest way is to just go to the download windows 11 page, download and run the Windows 11 Installation Assistant and you are off to the races. No need for enablement packages or repair installs.

This should work to update any outdated old installation, regardless of feature pack. I do it all the time.

Download Windows 11

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I would compare the time it takes to install Windows 11 from start, all my apps and games and move my data, vs they time it takes to upgrade Windows and add the apps and games I want. For a new device (either new model or recently purchased refurbished) I would format the disk and do a new Windows 11 installation. There is no point keeping the old system of the previous owner, if any. Even for a brand new model I would format it and reinstall Windows anyway to make sure I get exactly what I want and not a bunch of useless trial applications I will uninstall anyway.

However, if it is one of my own computers and there is a new version of Windows out, I would try to upgrade it first because it would take significantly less time than starting from scratch and move my data. Don't forget that I would have to activate again all these applications and this might not be possible for all and have to buy new licenses which increases the cost. No thanks, I prefer the upgrade in this case and it takes much less time that starting over.

spapakons said:

Do you have the receipt or invoice of purchase? It should state the Warranty duration which starts from the date of the document. You can confirm that if you call the store and ask.

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I scanned the receipt and uploaded it on the aforementioned form

/Mike

Have you registered with Lenovo? You might have to register so the Warranty status is updated according to the date of purchase. This is valid for HP here in Greece. However, the Law protects us and our Warranty is valid from date of purchase irrespectively if we have registered or not. We return the product to the store and if we can prove we still are covered by Warranty and refused to honor it, we can fill a report to the Consumers Protection Institute and they risk facing legal issues.

andrew129260 said:

and I hope the price was good.

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IMHO, If the price was right, registering the laptop with Lenovo reset the factory warranty and the laptop preformed the way I wanted it, I would keep it. If not it would be going back to the store for a refund. When I buy new laptops for either my wife or for me I always buy factory refurbished laptops from Micro Center. The way I see it is that we're getting a more up to date laptop with a factory warranty for less money. As for being refurbished vs. new, the three brand new laptops my wife bought from our local big chain retail store turned out to not be worth what she paid for them. We were happy with the HP all-in-one desktop after replacing the HDD with a spare SSD I had. We still have it even though we no longer use it.

Lenovo, HP and other manufacturers make a deal with Government or large companies and lease some laptops for a few years. Then they make a new deal and offer a new model. They take the old ones back to offer a better price for the new model. Then they check the old ones, replace any faulty parts and they sell them to Suppliers or Retailers as refurbished. Then they sell them to the final users at a much lower price than the original price when the model was new and sealed. What I am trying to say is that you don't have to worry if you buy older refurbished models. You just buy older technology for lower price than a current model. These have only one or two years of Warranty because the manufacturer won't have any profit replacing parts under Warranty for more duration. For most businesses that use Office applications it is ideal. They hardly need more power anyway. Same for the average user that checks the socials and plays a casual game without demanding a fast graphics card. I would buy new if I really needed the extra performance.

I wouldn't be worried about getting windows updated. That's easy enough.But I disagree with doing that. Warranty or not the customer has 3 year old hardware. Hardware has changed a lot in 3 years so if I bought a new machine, I would want the current hardware to have all the improvements. But that's just me.

spapakons said:

Lenovo, HP and other manufacturers make a deal with Government or large companies and lease some laptops for a few years. Then they make a new deal and offer a new model. They take the old ones back to offer a better price for the new model. Then they check the old ones, replace any faulty parts and they sell them to Suppliers or Retailers as refurbished. Then they sell them to the final users at a much lower price than the original price when the model was new and sealed. What I am trying to say is that you don't have to worry if you buy older refurbished models. You just buy older technology for lower price than a current model. These have only one or two years of Warranty because the manufacturer won't have any profit replacing parts under Warranty for more duration. For most businesses that use Office applications it is ideal. They hardly need more power anyway. Same for the average user that checks the socials and plays a casual game without demanding a fast graphics card. I would buy new if I really needed the extra performance.

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Not all refurbished computers are old leased computers that were returned at the end of the lease. Every refurbished laptops I have purchased have been up to date laptops that were returned for what ever reason the original owner had.

If you return a faulty product under Warranty, there is an initial period, I think one year, that you can ask for a different model and pay the difference. In that case the manufacturer repairs the faulty product and sells it as refurbished because obviously they cannot sell it as new. The refund is not always the original price but the current price if it has dropped, but better than nothing.

Back to the original post. There are options and only the owner of the device can decide what works best for them. Myself, I'm still happily using 23H2 in this old non-compliant X99 platform. Personally, out of principle, I would do all that I could to exchange that unit for something not made by Lenovo. This company was charged and fined at least twice for scamming consumers with embedded spyware. Evidently they did not learn from their first slap on the wrist. I try to avoid companies like these like the plague.

I did notice that even though I'm using 23H2 I'm still getting critical updates. Kaspserky keeps me topped off for virus definitions and I am using a TPM2 module. I would imagine that there would be a way to get the latest distro/version of Win 11 to work on this unit as well. Rufus could make this feasible, I'm guessing, but I am content with what I have on this unit as I'm working on a newer project that already runs an 'untweaked' version of 25H2, soon to become my main work station this year. (I managed to get rid of Co-Pilot on it so far.) So I'm thinking Rufus would be an option for the OP.

Another option apart from exchanging the unit for something more reputable would be Windows X-LITE. I've been playing with it and I have it installed on my wife's PC now. It's very snappy, very responsive, and definitely deals with bloatware issues connected with AI. I have to say I was impressed. At some point I would like to get X-Lite installed on this X99 unit. There are some who scorn X-Lite but I would encourage people to try it first. IMO it should have been our original Windows 11. The whole concept of only adding the apps you need as you need them is very appealing. Anyway, I've probably already stated enough. User preference prevails.

Scannerman said:

Back to the original post. There are options and only the owner of the device can decide what works best for them. Myself, I'm still happily using 23H2 in this old non-compliant X99 platform. Personally, out of principle, I would do all that I could to exchange that unit for something not made by Lenovo. This company was charged and fined at least twice for scamming consumers with embedded spyware. Evidently they did not learn from their first slap on the wrist. I try to avoid companies like these like the plague.

I did notice that even though I'm using 23H2 I'm still getting critical updates. Kaspserky keeps me topped off for virus definitions and I am using a TPM2 module. I would imagine that there would be a way to get the latest distro/version of Win 11 to work on this unit as well. Rufus could make this feasible, I'm guessing, but I am content with what I have on this unit as I'm working on a newer project that already runs an 'untweaked' version of 25H2, soon to become my main work station this year. (I managed to get rid of Co-Pilot on it so far.) So I'm thinking Rufus would be an option for the OP.

Another option apart from exchanging the unit for something more reputable would be Windows X-LITE. I've been playing with it and I have it installed on my wife's PC now. It's very snappy, very responsive, and definitely deals with bloatware issues connected with AI. I have to say I was impressed. At some point I would like to get X-Lite installed on this X99 unit. There are some who scorn X-Lite but I would encourage people to try it first. IMO it should have been our original Windows 11. The whole concept of only adding the apps you need as you need them is very appealing. Anyway, I've probably already stated enough. User preference prevails.

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According to the specs, the OP's Lenovo is fully capable of running Windows 11 25H2 without tricks to bypass compatibility check. Just download latest ISO from Microsoft to upgrade although it might be better to just wipe the disk and do a clean installation.


What CPU has your X99 system? Use CPU-Z to find out which instruction sets it supports. If you see SSE4.2, then you can bypass compatibility check to upgrade to 24H2 or 25H2. To go directly to 25H2 from 23H2 download latest ISO (it must be the same language, watch the difference between English aka US and International English aka UK), disconnect from the internet and execute this command:

d:\setup /product server

Where d: is the drive letter of the virtual DVD drive when you mount the ISO. The parameter forces Setup in "Server" mode. When installing a Windows Server version it never checks compatibility, it just proceeds. Of course since the ISO contains only "consumer" versions (Home and Pro) this is what you are going to install, not any "Server" version. More precisely it will upgrade to Home or Pro depending to what you currently have. You can then change the key if you wish to switch from Home to Pro.

Although versions such as X-Lite are faster than the standard (aka vanilla) version, they sacrifice compatibility and features. I prefer to have all features even if I am never going to use them (yes I was running Windows Vista/7 Ultimate back in the day) and maximum compatibility, so I never use these. I install the standard version and disable the features I don't need to make it faster. If I ever change my mind, I can always enable them back, while using X-Lite it is harder to add the missing stuff. Apart from disabling startup applications and useless non-Microsoft services, you can also disable useless visual effects (transparency, fades, animations) to make an old system much faster. After you have installed proper graphics drivers of course.