My cousin had an old Dell that had an HDD with that "optane" crap, you know a 16GB NVMe "cache" that allegedly did anything. I was going to pull that out, put in a proper NVMe drive, leave the old hard drive in there as additional space, and install Windows 10.

There are apparently BIOS settings that need to be altered for this to work, and Windows would throw "UNEXPECTED ERROR 0x1C4B332AFE943CE2C4 or something to that effect and wouldn't finish installing. Mind you, you don't get a usable Windows environment, so you have to copy that long string of text by hand into another device to find...nothing. Nearly no results out there.

After awhile of trying to get a functioning Windows install media (which is difficult to do from a Linux machine. Way to go burning that bridge, Microsoft) I eventually decided to put Mint on this thing, which also gave an error. This error read something like "Unable to install, probably because there's a problem with the NVMe storage settings, you may need to disable TLVRQ (or whatever the generic term for Optane was) and try again. See this page in the Wiki for more information." And it gave a link to that page, because of course we're booted into a fully functioning live environment with internet access and a web browser, and it also gave a QR code link to that same wiki page so you could view it on mobile.

Microsoft isn't even trying anymore.