I would be surprised to see that kind of setup from Dell. From my experience they produce work horses and don't mind people tweaking their laptops. You can disassemble, replace memory, hard drive, clean CPU/GPU fans, assemble it back, and still have valid manufacturer warranty. And yes, I personally replaced wifi and bluetooth cards on my inspiron, precision, xps15 laptops without problems before. So unless they drastically changed their vision, I would expect them to still build product which is hacker-friendly.
Probably not Dell (I have no idea) but Lenovo apparently has a white list for these things. I don't mean to pile on the recent carp storm that they are in... I just happen to have a idea pad y510p. (I am contemplating removing everything and installing Windows from scratch.)
That doesn't surprise me, Lenovo seem to be working hard to become the next HP in terms of hardware quality. I recently spent hours and hours trying to get a Thinkstation to boot with ECC memory that it specifically listed as supporting. The Lenovo engineers seem to basically get the motherboards to the point that they can kind of boot with the exact hardware the machine ships with and then completely give up. The smallest hardware changes would render that machine unbootable, including inexcusable things like changing graphics cards (Nvidia -> Nvidia too, just a model change).
FWIW, I got nothing but grief from the Lenovo Windows 8 / 8.1 installation on my Thinkstation--Windows booting into repair mode for no apparent reason, janky addon software, etc. A clean, fresh install made it all better, although finding the right storage drivers was a chore.
I'm thinking of doing the same for my y510p. Will the reset windows option keep the recovery partition so I can go back to factory state if I need to do so?
AFAIK the recovery partition is actually somewhat difficult to destroy even during a fresh, non-OEM install (I tried and gave up) but I would never choose to recover to the Lenovo build.
