I worked for a shady evil company, and when they illegally fired me, I never ended up returning a laptop - thinkpad running windoze.
Let’s say I wanted to put Win 8 or similar on it so I can play some video games. What would potentially be barriers to doing this? Said evil company is hopefully going out of business soon, and is a clusterfuck anyway, so they might not end up asking for it back.
Did the laptop have any kind of mobile device management on it? If so you will have to perform an offline install of windows otherwise the laptop will call home when installing to get security policies.
I would enable bitlocker on the drive to encrypt what is current there then do a secure erase just be 100% sure any leftover data is inaccessible.
I am also going to be that guy and say why run win8? A Linux distro with Proton will likely perform better and still receive security updates. Unless you are doing competitive ranked games.
What should I look out for as far as those security features?
I specifically want to run the Sims 2 with a 20+ gb mod folder, which idk how well that would work with proton.
Works fine on Proton, it even creates the mod folder in the correct place
Still, it’s probably worth going with either 7 or 10.
Also, if it’s registered with InTune (or whatever it’s called nowadays), it may be under company control even after a completely clean install. You can easily check though.