I want to replace the wifi card in my laptop

[RMerlin]

If my machine has a whitelist then it doesn't apply to the SSD as I have replaced it with a larger one I had spare. The NVME device is still the original.

No, SSDs are fine, it's only wifi cards that use a whitelist.

As mentionned, blocked Wifi cards would generally prevent the laptop from even booting, unless Lenovo has some of their models simply ignore the card.

Try booting with a Linux USB thumbdrive, see if you get better luck in detecting the card.

My good luck? When I inspected the licence keys with Showkey the embedded licence was for Win 8 pro.

You can upgrade to Windows 10 as long you have a valid Windows 7/8 Product Key, or a valid Windows licence stored in the BIOS. A few weeks ago I even succeeded in upgrading my old Asus T100 from Windows 8 to Windows 10. I was amazed that I managed to get it to upgrade despite having only 32 GB of MMC storage.