Windows 10 MURDERED your Lumia? Microsoft says it may have a fix

Microsoft has made some changes to the Windows Phone Recovery Tool that should keep it from accidentally disabling users' phones, but Lumia owners whose devices have already been trashed by the tool aren't necessarily out of the woods yet. Complaints began surfacing last week that customers who tried to roll their devices back …

[Spaceman Spiff]

And the fix is...

To replace their Lumias with either iPhones or Android phones. I have a Lumia 920 that I got as an employee at Nokia Mobile Phones before Microsoft took them over. Its battery life sucks - a few hours without charging at best, compared to about 3 days on my Galaxy S5 with a similar load.

[Hellcat]

Re: And the fix is...

A phone you must have had nearly 2 years ago? Kudos for keeping it relevent. I had a Nokia 3210. The screen resolution was awful - not even colour! Would never buy Nokia again etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

rubbish

Frankly I don't believe you. I have a Lumia 920 and a 930 and I measure the battery life in days. You are simply talking bollocks due to your obvious MS disdain.

[Ugotta B. Kiddingme]

from what I've read

about Win10 on phones, I think I'll just stick with 8.1 on my Lumia even AFTER they've got the kinks worked out. Yeah, 8.1 has its flaws and shortcomings, but it does what I want, reliably, without compromising battery life (2+ days between charging) or usability. I HATE that interface on a laptop, but find it very usable on a phone.

[Tom Chiverton 1]

So they flashed a firmware, and didn't verify the checksum ? Seriously ? Ameatuer hour...

[bazza]

This is *NOT* how you do interfaces

"To avoid future problems, Microsoft has published a new version of the Recovery Tool that sends data in 128KB blocks, rather than 2MB blocks as before. The data rate has also been lowered from 8MB per second to 5MB per second."

If you've got a slow thing being fed by a fast thing, you're gonna need flow control. Invented, oh I dunno, some decades ago? You don't go messing around with guessing data flow rates.

[Zane]

Re: This is *NOT* how you do interfaces

Yep this will one of the very big problems of software systems in the future - there is a bunch of developers (developers! developers!) out there who do not know anything about how communication works.

I don't know how many examples I have seen: first they need to come up with their own protocol, or at least with their own version of a protocol. Then they will write some spaghetti code that works for a while - as long as bandwidth is not a problem. Then things get more complex, and at some point they start getting into problems with packet loss, bandwidth problems etc. Takes them a while to understand what the problem is (if they either get it at all), and then they will come up with often very weird solutions, which only will work by magic. In the best case, they will re-invent the wheel.

One of the examples, the company had a working product for years. Then suddenly, there was a real demand on the bandwidth. The first build of software could only cope with 5% of the traffic. They had some rather hectic months, but finally got it working. They proudly presented their solution to the rest of the company - it was a bit sliding window with size 2 (that was 20012, not 1953).

/Zane

[Mike Lewis]

Re: This is *NOT* how you do interfaces

Been there, fixed that. I once rewrote 2,651 lines of C as a seven line shell script. The previous programming team had written a data transfer program with its own buggy implementation of ftp. I just used the one that was already on the computer.

[Vic]

Re: This is *NOT* how you do interfaces

I once rewrote 2,651 lines of C as a seven line shell script.

I was working at a place last year, where one of the "developers"[1] decided to replace one of my noddy shell scripts with a piece of Python code.

There was some 30 minutes' work in my script - it was exceptionally simple. He spent 2 months writing his tortuous snake before it was eventually discarded and the rest of the team reverted to my old bash script...

Vic.

[1] I use the term quite wrongly, of course...

[John Tserkezis]

Nice work Microsoft.

Not content with having tiny market, you're actively wrecking phones now.

[dogged]

Re: Nice work Microsoft.

Alpha software can brick devices. Film at 11.

[dogged]

Re: Nice work Microsoft.

I am thumbing down my own comment because my hatred for Microsoft and Windows Phone means that the normal rules of software development do not apply and people installing flagged-as-risky alpha preview software should not only be able to be completely certain that it will not damage anything but they should also be happy that the product will work perfectly with no bugs, issues, metrics, or further testing required. Testers should not have to test Microsoft products, that's absurd.

I am going to buy an Android phone right now because the Register's commentariat have decided that it's okay for those to need tests.

Also, Bing steals Google's results, market share is everything (except on the desktop where it is utterly irrelevant) I hate the Fisher Price interface of Windows 8 and am reverting to Windows XP which was never decried as a Fisher Price interface in any way at all.

You may now resume your normal 2 minutes hate. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Privacy is immoral. Advertisers are lovely. I love Big Brother.

[Anonymous Coward]

Updates.

I won't be allowing any Windows 10 updates on my 930. Ever.

It ain't broke - it don't need fixing.

[Anonymous Coward]

We need a new graphic for Windows 10

A new 'stickman' graphic for Windows 10...

Take the 1 in '10' turn it anticlockwise 90 degrees, attach to the zero.

Lift..and push this wheelbarrow of sh..it to your nearest landfill site.

MS still think they will get this out before October 2015?

I think they have amnesia/head in the sand to the fact Windows 7, Android Lolipop and iOS/Yosemite, Linux Mint and Ubuntu exist as alternatives.

Windows Update is a bag of nails, MS sort that, people might upgrade then to a MIcrosoft Product.