The CPU in this has no pins, is just contacts on the chip. The pins are in the motherboard, like the new 7000 series Ryzen.

I’d run XFCE themed with Chicago95 in this everyday.

You’d be surprised to know that a 500GB hard drive can be theoretically copied in 1 year with a 16kb/s transfer.

Do you have a spare set up where you can boot up from that same SSD? Literally any laptop would work plug and play and that would rule out the possibility of it being the motherboard on the OP.

Seconding this, Dell has excellent support for Linux on their enterprise laptops (Latitude and Precision). XPS are another breed, and tend to be marketed as a ultrabook or a MacBook competition.

I’ve had that happen on EndeavourOS but it was because of a corrupted ISO. Have you checked checksums?

I hate it, basically I have to force myself when I boot into windows to physically disconnect the RJ45 from the back, so it doesn’t replace the boot entries thru an update.