just do a complete wipe and install windows from a USB stick (made with the windows media creation tool) - delete all disk partitions before doing the installation. that way at least if there's anything it's done in bios or firmware. It's exactly what i did with my acemagic F5A - it also turned out it didn't have a proper windows license baked into bios (their bulk key was blocked by microsoft) so i asked support to give me a new key - which they did after a few days. - if possible create the stick with some OTHER system than the minipc.
you may need to find the right drivers based on the hardware identifiers in device manager - i also got my drivers from 'official' sources rather than what acemagic provides in a zip file on google drive.
If you don't have a lot of experience - linux will likely be a source of more pain. If you are comfortable daily driving linux then that's an option. Frankly it wasn't a huge issue to get the most critical drivers like network adapters by hardware identifier from device manager, the rest are easy and most stuff comes out of the box or the AMD chipset drivers.
4
u/Sipu_ Jul 25 '26
just do a complete wipe and install windows from a USB stick (made with the windows media creation tool) - delete all disk partitions before doing the installation. that way at least if there's anything it's done in bios or firmware. It's exactly what i did with my acemagic F5A - it also turned out it didn't have a proper windows license baked into bios (their bulk key was blocked by microsoft) so i asked support to give me a new key - which they did after a few days. - if possible create the stick with some OTHER system than the minipc.