I picked up two Lenovo T14 ThinkPads AMD Gen 2 late last year that due to my use case need to run Windows. At the time "the OS that shall not be named to avoid triggering the bots" was no longer supported so I decided to go with Win11 Pro. One has been running fine however the second one continues to freeze several minutes after booting.

I tested the hardware (UBCD and Win11PE tools) a couple months ago and from what I remember everything seemed fine. It comes from the factory with one RAM module soldered and one expansion slot so can't swap. Tonight I tried a new NVMe but couldn't get past the install wizard without freezing. So a after a couple more failed attempts I decided for giggles to install Linux Mint and it's been up for almost 12 hours. WTF!?

So my question is what would make Win11 freeze up but not Linux? Hardware? Drivers?

I would check RAM or driver first

Factory RAM is soldered. At this point I wouldn't know which drivers to look at.

>Factory RAM is soldered. At this point I wouldn't know which drivers to look at.

I would still run a memtest to limit out the ram. I would check device manager first to see if any devices is throwing a prompt

If Linux runs fine for 12 hours, the hardware is probably OK—that smells like a Windows-specific driver or power management issue. Check the AMD chipset drivers and especially the T14's firmware settings for "Modern Standby" or S0ix; that freezing-just-after-boot thing is a classic culprit on these AMDs. Or try a barebones Win11 install with zero Lenovo software and

Yeah, definitely worth checking the drivers first. Sometimes Windows updates can mess things up, while Linux tends to handle it better.