Is my bad first time experience typical?

fredericr

Hello.
I bought a Ser 7, 7840HS  off Amazon Canada a couple of weeks ago. I'm very excited about the hardware, but I found the listing a little inconsistently written and I wasn't sure if I was really getting Win 11 Pro (rather than Home Edition), since that is expensive.

So booted it up the first time and the default admin user was already setup set to "Gendalf".  Weird, but OK.  Poking around to check if everything was legit, beside noticing that the time wasn't set right, I noticed that the App Store wasn't working. That is kind of important since now even Notepad must be gotten from the App Store, so Notepad and other things weren't working.  There were also many HTTPS errors accessing Microsoft.com, possibly due to the security certificates not working.

Question: Is the Gendalf default user and the app store not working normal?  

Question: what is this version of Windows that you guys ship that has the App Store not working? Is that a "real", legal image of Windows 11 Pro?


Looking around some more, I discovered that the 1 Terabyte hard disk I bought showed up as 300GB.  At this point I was quite worried but I checked the Disk Manager and the hardware was 1TB but it was partitioned only for 300 GB and the rest unpartitioned.  
There is no way someone nontechnical could figure this out.  No doubt people must be returning them if that's what gets shipped in Canada.

Because there were many partitions  - recovery, some linux with GRUB partitions - it was actually impossible to resize the main partition to use the maximum size without doing a clean wipe and re-install of Windows.  Of course, I did that not knowing I'd need to request a new Win 11 Pro Key - which you provided, thank you. But I thought it would have been like Windows 10 where the key is stored in the BIOS.  You should probably tell us in the instruction to save the win 11 pro key if we need to do that before re-install.

Is that typical or is that an error on your side? Do you ship a 500GB image on 1TB SER7 machines or something?  

Are we supposed to be technically knowledgeable and figure out to re-install Win 11 Pro? You provide the instruction to do it, but not why we should do that.

tinted

I bought SER 7 from Amazon US recently as well and I also got windows 11 pro shipped with it. Don't know about the legitimacy of the OS but I was going to do a fresh install anyway since I never trust OEM windows install but I never got around to do that because I wanted to be certain that everything was good about Mini PC first.

Unfortunately, my SER 7 has sub par CPU performance compared to all the online reviews and user benchmark results of SER 7 and also compared to the 7840hs processor benchmarks in general.

I am also experiencing display driver issues like programs open with blank white space and I have to minimize and open them again to get them to work. Had game crashes as well in Valorant game(did not try any other games).

I was hoping that a BIOS update would fix these issues and I updated to the latest V37 bios but after the update, I got my first blue screen and at this point, I just lost hope and now I thinking of returning the mini pc.

Beelink Official drivers for SER 7 are broken as well

Lol, that gandalf user id is wierd, atleast when I got my mini pc I had my OS resetted, maybe yours was not resetted or you got user returned piece.

App store not working is wierd as well. My SER 7 only came with 3 partitions, EFI, Recovery and windows partition. So those gurb and linux partitions might indicate that some user used it and returned it for some reason.

NTT

tinted replied at 2023-12-31 19:19
I bought SER 7 from Amazon US recently as well and I also got windows 11 pro shipped with it. Don't  ...

Same as my SER7.
sub-par CPU performance/ display rendering issues like blackout/ unstable BIOS V37,V31/ huge amount of OCCT 3D standard errors etc..

NTT

From the "Gandalf" issue and the partition for linux, what you bought seems used pc, I guess.

fredericr

ok I feel stupid now for not thinking it might be a refurbished or returned PC.

Now I'm a little freaked out about it (why was it returned, is it defective? was a root kit installed), so I'm going to return it. $600 USD (800$ CAD) is no longer a great deal if I have to worry like this.

I ran some Cinebench on it and didn't notice any issues, although it underperforms an Apple M1, but outperformed some I9.  

If you found benchmarks runs slower than the youtube reviews say, I guess they may have been sent PC with some bios version that gives more voltage to the CPU. Mine seems to run at the expected "base" spec.  Which is.. OK? It's still a small PC with a mobile GPU and a massive amount of RAM.  I did find the write speed of the SSD surprisingly slow and slower than my years old Samsung EVO drive on my 2016 PC.

Support-03

Hello there,

Sorry for the trouble.
①If there is a default user name , it might be a refurbished PC or it is a tested PC by our tech guy without format.
You can send the item back for a replacement.

②The Microsoft store is preinstalled in the PC, if your PC doesn't have it, maybe the system has a bug or someone has deleted before.  You can contact our support to install a APP store.

③ The key is imbedded in the system rather than BIOS. So if you reinstall the system or reset the PC, you need a new key from us.  

gngan

I had another issue and Bee-Link wasn't able to help. They've requested me to return to Amazon instead of a RMA/warranty. Imagine without Amazon return, doubt they will honor their warranty.

tuiguang7

hello, if your machine is under the warranty, we could replace it for you, we suggest you to return to amazon, it is because it will be faster for you to get a refund and buy a new one within one month ( your amazon return window is still open), if do not return to amazon, we could replace it for you too, it just takes a little bit longer, so we suggest that you could return it back amazon. only your machine is under the warranty, no matter what we will honor the warranty. Do not worry. Thanks