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Windows 10 Upgrade Strategies, Pitfalls and Fixes As MSFT Servers Are Hit Hard
MojoKid writes: The upgrade cycle begins, with Microsoft's latest operating system--the highly anticipated Windows 10--rolling out over Windows Update for free, for users of Windows 7, 8 and 8.1. For those that are ready to take the plunge over the weekend, there are some things to note. So far, Microsoft has been rolling out the upgrade in waves and stages. If you are not one of the 'lucky' ones to be in the first wave, you can take matters into your own hands and begin the upgrade process manually. While the process is mostly simple, it won't be for everyone. This guide steps through a few of the strategies and pitfalls. There are two main methods to upgrade, either through Windows Update or through the Media Creation Tool. In either case, you will need to have opted-in for the Windows 10 Free Upgrade program to reserve your license. Currently, the Windows Update method is hit or miss due to the requirement for additional updates needing to be installed first and Microsoft's servers being hit hard, leading to some rather humorous error messages like the oh-so helpful description, "Something Happened." Currently, it would be best to avoid the Windows Update upgrade, at least for the time being. Numerous issues with licensing have been reported, requiring manual activation either through the dreaded phone call, or by running slmgr.vbs /ato at the command prompt to force license registration.
Windows 10 upgrade tells me my CPU is not compatible. It's a Core 2 Q8400, and I can't find what's not compatible about it. There are descriptions on how to 'refresh' the detection system but so far no luck.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
leading to some rather humorous error messages like the oh-so helpful description, "Something Happened."
Warning : Something's gonna happen
Error : Something happened
Debug : It had to happen
Crash : Why me !
What I find the most annoying is how Edge treats you like a special little snowflake when you're not connected to the internet:
"You're not connected."
"And the web just isn't the same without you."
"Let's get you back online."
Blech.
I hate to say it, but after reading the article, the problems affecting these Windows upgrades seem very minor compared to the problems I had upgrading some Debian 7 systems to Debian 8. The first clue I got that something was wrong was when the upgraded systems wouldn't completely boot. After digging into it I found out that Debian 8 uses something called systemd, and that lots of other people have experienced severe problems with it, too. Well I don't want to bore anyone with the long story of my struggles but I fought with this systemd thing for a couple of days. In the end I had to give up. I had been very happy with Debian for many years, but not any longer. I tried out FreeBSD 10 instead, which actually works really well for me. It runs the same software as Debian, but under the hood it's so much better. I can just trust it to work properly, which is something I can no longer trust Debian to do.
Here is a collage of privacy violations in Windows 10. Is it really an upgrade?
Suggestion....
Everyone please wait on this for any seriously important machines. If something goes wrong here- it's going to go very wrong.
And as a reference: "very wrong" does not infer "goodness".
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
I've done 2 machines, my surface tablet, which went super easy, the only issue that I noticed was I had to adjust the sensitivity for the pen. I actually like the handwriting recognition alot, I'm still getting used to it a bit, but it's very good. I've also updated a 3 year old lenovo laptop, no problems with that either, both updates went very smooth.
However OS X and Windows, is less struggling for hardware compatibility. Linux seems to be hit or miss, unless you invest a lot of time trying to determine if it is compatible enough, as many of discussions on such hardware fail to state if it works with a distribution or not.
IME the big stuff is iffy on Linux, the small stuff on Windows. But there's a user in this thread finding that Windows 10 refuses to install on his Core 2 Quad. Maybe Linux actually has better hardware support than Windows? I think it does. I think if you took a windows disc and a Linux disc and tried to install both on every single PC on the planet, that you would have better luck with the Linux disc. In the trial, you are permitted to install only authorized packages, meaning drivers either direct from the OS distributor (from the package archive, from windows update, on the CD) or from the OEM or ODM (e.g. Compaq or Atheros.)
I think you'd have less machines that just outright refuse to install, and you'd also have more working peripherals at the end of the day. For example, all but one of the scanners I have ever owned, I got cheap used because they weren't supported on newer versions of windows even though the same scanner protocol was still in use; the manufacturer simply removes support for the old hardware from the new version of the driver, even though the new driver is perfectly capable of operating it. HP is especially horrible about this, never ever buy a scanner from them and expect to use it through an OS upgrade. Same for all-in-one imaging devices. But everyone does it. Meanwhile, SANE just keeps adding support for more devices...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There could be less demand, If we really had a good handle on the limited time to upgrade for free window.
There are a lot of people who are not in a rush to get windows 10. However this limited time means they might as well upgrade now vs waiting too long and having to pay for it. (Yes I am wide open about Free/Open Source Linux advantages...) But is it that important to give an artificial high demand to make investors thinks people really REALLY want the upgrade. vs just Getting it now for Free, vs waiting later for it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Go here or here or here or here.
All have excellent upgrades available to any version of Windows.
I'd always planned to burn .isos anyhow, so this is a good option for me. (Yeah, yeah, "USB stick, blah, blah". Why am I going to use a $5 USB stick instead of a $0.50 DVD for something I don't expect to use more than once or twice?)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The surface pro and Surface pro 2 BOTH have had non stop issues with wireless drivers for two reasons.
1 - microsoft chose the shittiest wireless chipset made on the planet, the Marvell Avastar 88W8797 Wireless
2 - The drivers were written by drunken morons.
you can easily bork the wireless that require you to delete the device, uninstall the drivers, reboot, re detect and then reinstall the drivers. I was hoping that microsoft had fixed this with windows 10, but nope. it's the exact same crap windows 8 driver that somehow self corrupts it's self on boot up.
It doesn't help that Marvell as a company makes only steaming piles of dog shit. All of their chipsets are complete garbage and any maker that uses them are ran by morons.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Looking at how the update was going to be done, I left the machine on overnight idling.
On the thirtieth, I was notified I was ready, and upgraded. Could not have been easier.
I would have thought that reserving on rollout day would have put me in a long waiting line, and of course there would be a lot of serverhammer (c) on the first few days.
The whole process was flawless, and thank gawdd for that. My original plan was to wait until near the end of the update cycle and see how things were going. Make a decision on staying with 7 or not. But a fellow I was doing some software/hardware troubleshooting with foolishly updated to W10 thinking it would fix his problem, so I needed to know a little about ten before I took remote control of his computer
The results stunned me. Everything just worked. I didn't have to go to the web to figure out simple things like I did in W8. After 4 hours of playing around in it, I was ready to support it. Windows 8 was so nasty, I refused to support it.
Perhaps a Ballmerless company grew some balls here, listened to it's customers, and did it right. Really a tough job taking the steaming pile of shit that was W8, and turning it into something a confirmed Unix like devotee such as myself likes.
There's
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
When I want to be very productive, I step away from the computer.
You are welcome on my lawn.
On my desktop I removed the update that facilitated the upgrade, I will wait and see how things go.
Then possibly purchase the pro version, or enterprise if available to consumers, as it offers more control.
But the detail is, MS doesn't appear to allow updates to virtual machines, I installed the KB 3035583 on the win7 pro virtual machine and nothing, no nag screen, no ability to update.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Hey, my upgrade strategy is almost the same, to keep Windows 7 for games and audio recording and otherwise stay with GNU/Linux.
I think (this is merely speculation based on my limited experience) that "reserving" your copy of Windows 10 simply takes a profile of your computer hardware (serial numbers, mac address, etc) and sends it to the microsoft licensing servers so that you don't need to enter a Windows 10 product key when you install Win 10 from an ISO.
I performed an in-place upgrade on my Win 7 laptop, and it didn't ask for a key. I then swapped out the Hard Drive with a blank one, and installed Windows 10 clean from CD. It asked for a product key (twice) during setup, but you can choose to skip that. When install was complete, windows was activated! The activation server must have already known about my hardware being properly licensed.
How does it feel to have wait times longer than Blizzard's last expansion release?
Click on the gear icon within the search box popup and you can turn Cortana and web search off.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
So, my sense is that Windows 10 is the "odd-numbered" version that I'll eventually end up upgrading to. Right now I do most of my serious stuff on linux, and maintain a decent windows 7 PC mainly for gaming purposes (since I still have many games that are not linux-compatible). I tend to view my windows PC more like a gaming console as a result.
So, when is the right time to upgrade? I suspect that it will be once DirectX 12 is available, stable, and in some kind of use. At the very least I'll want to wait until the rumor mill indicates that my graphics drivers (Radeon) are reasonably stable on Win10.
I'm also torn on whether to upgrade in place or just wipe and reinstall (especially since I'm still running my OS from the non-SSD drive in the system). Is installing Win10 from scratch supported, and free?
My guess is that it will be at least a few months before I'll be upgrading...
Do not bother upgrading folks if what you have works fine unless you have a pyschotic episode with the flat look of 8.1 and can't find classic start.
There are many many bugs. Items do not fill in properly in menus. Adhock wifi not available, disjointed tiles in TV and music, Edge crashing, Edge having no extensions, poor battery life on the surface pro 3, One drive not having placeholders, Grove not having select all on playlists, .NET 4.6 JIT tail bug where arguments get scrambled, and many many others in just the first few days reported
This reminds me 0f XP. Yes, XP pre - SP1. XP was not considered God by users and IT departments in 2001. It was buggy and had compatibility and network probloems before SP1 and SP 2 was where it finally got somewhat solid.
Windows 10 has an unfinished and baked feel. It won't touch my systems until Redstone update 1 something later this fall ... or maybe next summer as I see it more as just hittting beta now as MS rushed this.
http://saveie6.com/
I know that I am a cohort of one, but I installed 10 on a single office laptop, and it seems as if Firefox an Chrome are both noticeably slower at rendering pages than they were with 8.1. I've tried restarting the laptop, and that seemed to help a small bit, but not much. Chrome just crashed on me a minute ago while trying to load Google News. Chrome is stock, and on Firefox, I'm running NoScript, Flashblock, and Ghostery, and it's just crazy slow. When clicking on a link to read a simple news story, the images are loading like dial up. This is not happening on our other laptops and tablets, so I think it's specific to the laptop and not to my internet connection.
Make love, not reality television.
I downloaded and created a 64-bit install DVD for a test system which had Windows 7 Pro 32-bit because I was planning to switch it over to 64-bit anyway. Obviously this requires a clean install.
Turns out that to activate, you MUST do the upgrade from an activated Windows 7/8/8.1. Apparently that will register the hardware signature for the activated Windows 10 on Microsoft's servers. After you've upgraded to Windows 10 that way, you can then go back and do a clean install if desired - because that hardware signature is known it'll activate on its own after the clean install, or at least that's how I found it described.
I was just glad that I had the Windows 7 Pro SP1 64-bit ISO handy - I ended up reinstalling that, activating (had to call in, when they offer you the smartphone option, TAKE IT), never even installing updates, then installing the upgrade immediately.
fencepost
just a little off
Why do I have a 6.55GB $Windows.~BT folder if it won't let me upgrade yet? If it already downloaded everything at some point, shouldn't the install just start? Why stagger the installs and not the downloads? I thought the point was to not hammer the servers with lots of downloads at once...
Morphing Software
WSUS reports windows 10 as Vista when will MS fix that?
And that's because Windows and not Autodesk how, exactly?
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
You have been punished for being dense enough to use Windows Explorer.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Total Commander.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Free how can you beat that.....
In order to use Cortana, you have to switch your Windows login to be your Microsoft account. No, thanks! I have no intention of changing my desktop login to be my Microsoft account. Cortana will have to wait.
I think your W10 upgrade failed. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Of all of these data-sharing policies, Wi-Fi Sense is the craziest. How many places out there share their Wi-Fi passwords with selected people? Microsoft makes no effort to get the Wi-Fi owner's permission to share a password.
If one visitor has W10 and 100 contacts, and each of those 100 contacts has another 100 contacts, and each of those... It's not clear just how the password will propagate, but it could well be that sharing with a single W10 use essentially makes the password public. This is not why we set passwords on our Wi-Fi networks.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I don't think you've used Total Commander Ultima Prime, furthermore there's no functionality that Windows Explorer would have and TC wouldn't.
Using TC since ages and frankly Windows Explorer is something I haven't started in months.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I have been trying to update from Windows 7 using the MediaCreation tool method. The direct update never worked for me. At some point, it would crash and close down, sometimes in the middle of download, or sometimes in the middle of verifying media, etc. No useful errors. What did work was to use the MediaCreation tool to download an ISO image of the OS. Burn it on a DVD, then unpack everything back on my desktop (not sure if this last setup is necessary), and then run the setup.exe from there.