I specifically asked IT for a Linux dell workstation. They gave me Windows education edition, with a bunch of CISCO backdoors on it, and locked the bios.
Gee.. Thanks for the expensive paperweight. 
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@jmw150
Send it back to IT with a nice note saying that you're not able to use the computer because your work requires tweaking the UEFI/BIOS and *for some reason* you're not able to access it.
(It worked once for me. Avoid showing anger, but be as ironic as you wish - they will not understand, or they will pretend not to.) 😆
@mc
I did just that lol. It also took a signature from me, and then my boss for them to back off.
At the end they returned a laptop that had half of the drivers missing, and regular windows installed on it without its license. (a license we were forced to pay for)
But that is all I needed, to get their grubby mitts out of our research tools. Got a fully functional Linux machine running half a day after that.