I worked for a shady evil company, and when they illegally fired me, I never ended up returning a laptop - thinkpad running windoze.
Let’s say I wanted to put Win 8 or similar on it so I can play some video games. What would potentially be barriers to doing this? Said evil company is hopefully going out of business soon, and is a clusterfuck anyway, so they might not end up asking for it back.
Make sure to not have AMT or Computrace, just use linux/bsd instead of windows just to be sure.