Party like it's 2004: Almost a quarter of Windows 10 PCs living with the latest update

While Microsoft has yet to release official figures, the latest incarnation of Windows 10 has picked up steam. The May 2020 update is now on 24.1 per cent of PCs, going by the 150,000 systems surveyed by AdDuplex. It's quite a jump from the 11.6 per cent of the previous month, and seems mostly at the expense of last year's …

[Version 1.0]

Updates?

Windows Vista looked wonderful, Windows 7 worked better, Windows 8 looked terrible and worked like crap, Windows 10 made Windows 8 look great and usable.

What's the next update going to do?

[Mike 137]

Re: Updates?

"What's the next update going to do?"

Judging by the report from Isces, it'll probably brick all machines regardless of vendor badging. But hasn't this happened before?

[Version 1.0]

Re: Updates?

Q: How many software engineers does it take to change a light bulb?

A: One, but if he changes it, the whole building will probably fall down.

[lsces]

But it bricks dell computers!

Spent yesterday winding back another Dell Optiplex computer that had been bricked by the update. All the machines have now had the feature updates disabled until next year. At least THAT facility is available now. The update screws up the USB mouse and keyboard so they are unusable. One might be able to recover with a PS2 keyboard except the motherboards don't have a PS2 port. Boot from a USB stick and repair allows removing 2004 and makes the machines workable again, but it's a bloody waste of time having to do that after machines have been unusable while the update was applied as well.

[chivo243]

Re: But it bricks dell computers!

I made my first "Not-At-Work" Windows 10 support call a couple of weeks ago. One of my colleagues was at his SOs house, and her Win10 had lost networking. Naturally, I asked him to check the version, sure enough, it was 2004. Naturally, I asked when did networking stop? Right after the last WU! WoooHooo!. As he is not a Windows guy, I had to step him through finding the device manager, and tossing the network card, scanning for hardware changes...

Had it been anybody else (sorry Mom!), I would have said sorry, I don't do Windows...

[Roland6]

Re: But it bricks dell computers!

Had a couple of HP desktops where the update lost the NIC and the USB drivers... Not having a blank CD available (W10 could see the default CD-ROM drive), making the drivers available so that W10 could find them was fun...!

[Hubert Cumberdale]

Re: But it bricks dell computers!

Mine both said they had no internet connection when they clearly had. I shouldn't have to poke around in the registry to fix an update immediately after it's been applied!

[pc-fluesterer.info]

Re: But it bricks dell computers!

"I would have said sorry, I don't do Windows..." - I always say: I do W7, I do W8.1, I do migration from W to Linux. But I don't do W-X, by no means!

[David 132]

Re: But it bricks dell computers!

Just an idea - maybe install a VNC server on the machine, or enable Remote Desktop, so that after 2004 borks the USB mouse & keyboard you can connect remotely and attempt to fix it? I suspect that removing and re-installing the devices from Device Manager, or updating the Intel USB drivers, would resolve it, but I freely admit I'm speculating.

[Captain Obvious]

Re: But it bricks dell computers!

Not good if/when it takes out your networking.

[Version 1.0]

Re: But it bricks dell computers!

A typical Windows 10 solution - fix the software problem with more software.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: But it bricks dell computers!

Does it appear in this list?

Mine does, I fell for the trap, and it regularly bluescreens.

Then I learnt my reason for 'upgrading', WSL2, was being backported to earlier versions.

[stownsend]

It took 6 attempts and 2004 eventually installed and with the laptop running like a snail on the weeks prior it now works better and the constant waiting for cache messages in edge have greatly reduced!

For once worth the hassle to get it installed!

Cheers

Stu

[guyr]

I've tried to update my single Windows 10 system to 2004 at least 10 times now. *Still* failing. Thankfully, my primary system is on Windows 7, which is safe because Microsoft abandoned it. :(

[fidodogbreath]

My work PC says 2004 is ready for me. Company isn't requiring us to install it yet, so I'll just wait for the beta testing to finish.

[Blackjack]

Hey guys!

Remember when Windows updates usually didn't fuck everything up?

[druck]

Re: Hey guys!

No

[katrinab]

Re: Hey guys!

I do. The updates to Windows 2000 were generally pretty good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost a quarter of Windows 10 PCs living with the latest update

So the other 75% are Dead, Bricked, in an Endless Reboot Cycle or MIA?

[Terry 6]

Re: Almost a quarter of Windows 10 PCs living with the latest update

Or just can't be given 2004. The Dell site says my i7 XPS 8700 hasn't been tested for it and (excluding a few more recent PCs) Dell XPSs apparently won't be.

[Luiz Abdala]

Boot from this drive.

I am still waiting for a single snap-in tool FROM MICROSOFT that simply says:

"BOOT FROM THIS DRIVE."

It should dismount the drive, unpartititon it, format a fresh NTFS/whatever bootable partition on it and migrate the WHOLE boot to it, and then reboot the machine off of the fresh drive. (It would be usually unpartitioned anyway, but it must ask permissions first, of course).

Acronis felt unable to read my older boot drive and clone it into a fresh SSD, and I haven't found the time to setup a fresh boot from scratch and install EEEEEVERYTHING again. I'm kinda stumped at finding a tool capable of just cloning my current setup for free..

After 50 years, I feel Microsoft should not fear us cloning their OS freely, but it reached the point where the thing just blobs "please activate windows" in an overlay, and that's it. The slap on the wrist stays on screen forever, but it won't bother an USER any further.

This is not the place (forum, right?), but any ideas?

We haven't reached "Theseus ship" status yet, because Windows refuses to install in a fresh storage media, you MUST make a clean install every time you need to upgrade.

[Russell Chapman Esq.]

I finally upgraded

I bought my laptop in 2013, an HP Envy dv6 with an Intel i7, I was also running Classic Menu on Win 8.1. The last year, the performance was really getting me down but for personal reasons I didn't change to Linux because I use Nik Software with Lightroom a lot. I really don't want to lose them because of what they allow me to do. What to do? I upgraded to a 2TB Samsung Evo SSD, converted the optical drive to use a 1TB HDD and upgraded from 8gb of Ram to 16gb. But still I resisted Windows 10, in fact, I was one of those who read up on and implemented actions to stop my Win 8.1 machine having Win 10 forced upon it. The thought of all that telemetry was my main issue. But then I learnt, MS backdated and forced the same telemety on Win 8.1, an OS with not much life left. So I bit the bullet and upgraded this August

So far? I kept the Classic Start Menu software, definitely not a fan of how MS does menus these days. Things run very smoothly. I also installed Revo Uninstaller to get rid of the crud and bloatware that came with the Win 10 upgrade. Still researching the best way to stop the Win 10 telemetry. My laptop has quite a few more years of life in it. If only Linux had professional quality photography software with support for Nik Collection plug-ins, the only thing stopping me going Linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

Please reinstall your OS to install this update

I tried to install Update 2004 on a working Windows 10, but it basically said before I can install it I need to erase the whole entire drive*/**(even the non-Windows partitions), and then do some other things in order to install the update.

*backup first, of course

** remove all extended/logical partitions, (and non Windows partitions too?), reduce number of partitions down to 3 or less, ...

Is the 2004 update going to worth all the effort and time?