Windows 10 is good, but …
I have finally upgraded all of my Windows machines to Windows 10, but it hasn’t been without its problems.
Firstly the main desktop machine would not upgrade no matter what I did. Every time it would do a 2GB download and take an hour before showing an alert with “Something happened” – which would have to be the most useless message ever! Clearly nothing happened because it was still at Windows 8.1; what they meant was that something prevented Windows 10 from being installed. So I think I’ll just look at the diagnostic log. Hmm, no logs. 🙁
Microsoft have got to be kidding. How am I meant to even being to fix this? Of course Google was my friend, but all I could find were people squealing in outrage, with lots of ‘this worked for me’ wild guesses. I did find a Microsoft support note and a tool. Unfortunately none of these suggestions made any difference. And the ‘Upgrade to Windows 10’ nag box kept coming up no matter how many times I killed it.
In the end I had to wipe the machine and do a fresh install of Windows 10, and then reinstall all my applications again. I am not sure how this improves my productivity.
The Lenovo E520 laptop was a much easier as the upgrade processes worked first time. There was one strange problem when at the end of the upgrade process, after logging into the machine, it showed an empty black desktop which could not be used. Restarting did the same thing. Initially I feared that the machine had become corrupt in some way, but a Google search found that this was a known problem with attached USB devices. As the only device connected was a mouse, I removed that and restarted. The machine then worked correctly and once the desktop was shown I could reconnect the mouse. No idea what that was about; probably something to do with updating the USB drivers.
Then I found that the desktop machine was rebooting everyday for some reason. The problem was that it was trying to install a Cumulative Update (KB3147458), which was failing and it would then try again the next day. The logs showed this had been happening for weeks. A Google search found this was a known problem, with the only solution from Microsoft being to reinstall Windows (which I had only just done). Even better, Microsoft have removed the ability to hide updates. Fortunately there is a tool for this.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/kb/3073930
Now after all of that I’m almost ready to do some actual work. Thanks Microsoft. </sarcasm>