OK, then. It’s been a busy week, but not all work-related. I had a lens replacement (cataract surgery) in my right eye yesterday. Perforce that meant a day off. In the meantime, I’ve been involved in intake on a new Copilot+ PC: an Intel Model this time. It’s a Yoga Slim 7 15ILL9. And indeed, for this PC upgrading Home to Prove proves challenging. I had to perform a factory reset on the PC to get it to work. Let me explain…

Why Upgrading Home to Pro Proves Challenging

Simply put, when I tried to upgrade from Home to Pro, none of the keys I tried would work. In fact, not even an attempt to purchase one from the MS Store did the trick, either. That’s when I knew something with my login wasn’t copascetic. So I used the System > Reset > Recovery > Reset this PC option to restore the OS to its “fresh from the factory” reset state.

This time, when I logged in I duly furnished an MSA into which my login account could be tied. And guess what: that did the trick! I was able to run updates (they hadn’t worked either) and then used a one-time key from Visual Studio Subscriptions (Thanks, MVP Program!) to upgrade from Home to Pro. I’m now logged into the new test PC via RDP which is how I like to interact with my test/review machines.

Introducing the Yoga Slim 7 15ILL9

It’s got an Intel Core Ultra 7 256V, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB NVMe SSD, with something new to me: integrated Arc Graphics 140V. Compared to the Snapdragon X ThinkPad T14s I’m getting ready to return to Lenovo, it’s got 8 cores (instead of 12), half the RAM, and a different CPU architecture (x64 vs. ARM64). But so far, it seems to run reasonably well. It got through the Home to Pro upgrade in under 5 minutes, handled WU updates with alacrity, and chuffed through a dozen items via PatchMyPC Home updater in under 2 minutes. So far, so good.

Now that I’ve got the device set up on my network, I can start putting it through its paces. Stay tuned as I start understanding how Intel based Copilot+ PCs compare to their Snapdragon X counterparts. Should be interesting…