It's official: In May, Microsoft will close the door, lock the vault, brick over the entrance of dreaded Windows 10 1809 Microsoft has confirmed that the ill-fated Windows 10 1809 update has just three months left to live. On Wednesday, Redmond issued an official notice that, as of May 12, 2020, the error-prone "Update of the Damned" will stop receiving upgrades, and holdouts still using the operating system version, for some reason, will be …
WIndows 10 will lets you plug in a USB flash drive or SD-card, and use it as temp space while Windows 10 upgrades. https://www.windowscentral.com/how-install-any-major-update-windows-10-low-storage-devices
You can also clear up a lot of disk space by running Disk Cleanup as Admin and ticking every box, this will remove old Windows & driver update files, and can save many GB of space.
WIndows 10 will lets you plug in a USB flash drive or SD-card, and use it as temp space while Windows 10 upgrades.
Looking at that solution in the link, it's pretty non-obvious and probably beyond the average user.
in my experience using a USB memory stick as extra storage does not work. You end up with it sat on 0% for hours after the reboot unless you remove the memory stick. But then later it asks you to put it back into the PC and the upgrade fails.
I tried for a whole day to upgrade from 1809 last week and kept getting this exact problem and just gave up in the end. I am going to wipe and install from scratch instead as the whole feature upgrades is just a nightmare.
Was it plugged into a USB3 port with the "Superspeed" gubbins, as it worked fine for me on some Linx tablets (To me they are proper bottom of the barrell machines).
Only issue I had with updates was a 4 year old Dell laptop, that was because Intel stopped supporting the chipset a year before W10 was released (Hugely annoying when a 14 year old Dell machine was still supported and although ran like a dog updated perfectly fine every time) and Arcsoft Totalmedia Extreme causing my machine to BSOD over 1/2 the time it booted (Probably doesn't help I have performed a clean install since the days of Windows 7 Home, but then I will be lazy if it works).
You can also clear up a lot of disk space by running Disk Cleanup as Admin and ticking every box, this will remove old Windows & driver update files, and can save many GB of space.
Alternatively, clean the hard drive off the motherboard will also save plenty of internal space and frustration time.
Joke(?) aside. If you need even one additional storage media, you are better off just moving the data off the internal drive and do a clean reinstall, which will have few Windows problems overall.
You can also go the whole hog and put all the documents, apps, files etc plus the Windows update directory on the USB stick (involves cmd and mklink) ...but then the 1903 update comes along that tries to reserve 8Gb on the HDD for "future updates".....and that one won't install no matter what you do as there's no way there's 8Gb spare on a 32GB hard drive.
Not managed to find a way round that yet.
Whatever happened to ReadyBoost ?
I liked that feature! Kept a high speed USB there but got fed up with it using up my one spare slot.
Of course the "Killer App!" would be a laptop camera sized PCB with the most common connectors and 16GB of high speed memory which also contains failsafe backups of all the drivers.
For most applications people rarely use the camera anyway but you could add this feature back in and make it 4K to boot with IR illuminator and face recognition.
Same here, I updated several computers to 1809 and used them without issue, they are now at 1909. Installation of 1809 was indeed finicky on a few of the computers but once installed, and the upgrade acknowledged as completed, everything seemed to work as expected.
On reading that I just did the same, with again the same result of an 1809 install (17763.1039 in my case).
That said this particular laptop has been in use for about 6 months now (as a normal cycle replacement for its predecessor), and I don't recall it ever blue-screening or giving any kind of issue at all.
I know it is (extremely) unpopular on this board to say, but I'm no longer a religious fanatic when it comes to OS UI experience. I was, long ago, but I am simply too busy doing work inside the applications that an OS runs to fret, hand-wring and otherwise soapbox on the fact that they changed the UI.
Windows 10's UI is *not* that bad. If I could post a screen grab of the computer I am currently on, upgraded from Win7 to Win10, you'll find a desktop interface with surprisingly little difference. The Start Menu and those tile buttons?? You can remove all the tiles (which only take up a very small area of the desktop space once opened as I've only added a small number of them) and end up with just a menu of programs without any tiles at all.
https://www.techjunkie.com/small-windows-10-start-menu/
My own Start Menu with tiles is even smaller than what is shown as the beginning example on that tips pages.
And, rather like Android, I barely go into my Start Menu anyway due to the fact that I have taskbar shortcuts for everything I truly use every day.
So I'm not sure why so many people rant and rave about this thing, I simply have far more important things to go on about. 1/2 of the complaints I think I read about is due to the complainer still commenting on the first generation of Win10 installs, or tablets (computer in Tablet mode), both of which, intentionally, have very large, touch-friendly Start Menu tiles even if you don't actually have a touchscreen. But those Big Tiles were shrunk several revisions ago on non-touchscreen devices, so much that they aren't even a real issue any more.
Me neither. I spent a couple of years distro-hopping in Linux, now staying with Siduction, Ubuntu Studio, and Mint, and the wife uses only Mac. I can work with just about anything, including Win 10. Er, Win 10 with some customizing, that is. But I customize my Linux desktops too.
The Windows UI has never been truly atrocious, except in Win 8 of course. Complaints about flat-look are, IMHO, whinges about aesthetics, and not serious complaints about usability.
"The Windows UI has never been truly atrocious, except in Win 8 of course. "
Even win 8 wasn't that bad if you only used it with a touch-screen. We had a bunch of Sony tablet-laptop convertible things that it came pre-installed on; using it 'natively' on the touchscreen was actually quite good.
The moment you plugged in a keyboard and mouse like a civilized human being, on the other hand, it was a complete nightmare of trying to use gestures and swipes with input devices that simply don't translate.
...which is out of support. Well done..
If you're 'never' changing to 10, you'd better start using Unix now because you won't have much choice otherwise.
10 isn't perfect, but it's alright and very stable provided you do things its way, and use relatively modern hardware. I'd recommend using the Pro version too..
Gaming and legacy program support
Reminder the 32-bit version of Windows 10 still runs Windows 3.1 16 bit apps perfectly fine.
There's downsides (It brings a lot of security baggage with it), but it's a different ideological approach to most other Operating Systems: in the last Decade, Apple have dropped Rosetta PowerPC support and 32 bit Apps, and Ubuntu threatened - and rapidly backtracked - on dropping 32 bit compatibility.
Not saying one approach is the "right" way, but it's a very different mindset.
On the version before then. Windows Update reboots my PC, gets 60% of the way through the installation, then fails with a completely uninformative error and rolls back. Takes a couple of hours each time.
Windows Update is therefore in the lovely position of telling me that I'm completely up to date, but also need to update. Not confusing at all.
No idea what the problem is, but I've come to the conclusion that I need to delete everything I can to reduce disk usage (disk is full of games, so I can dl from steam again easily enough) image to another disk and re-install from scratch...
sigh.
I miss Linux
On the plus side, I missed the update of death.
One of the major secrets with Windows 10 upgrade problems is that you MUST remove any aftermarket AV products. Then look at your hardware stack and see if you are using any significantly out of date drivers or support software, like scanners for example, and either update or remove the driver/software stack to be updated later.
Get all you ducks in a row and you will usually find that your Windows 10 update experience is much improved.
and holdouts still using the operating system version, for some reason, will be advised to move to at least the November 2019 build of the operating system.
I had 1809 and was in the position the updates were failing completely due to an error.
I tried everything I could think of or find on the net including resetting the updates, stopping and restarting the service.....
I then started getting page fault errors before finally hitting the point when shutting down the machine went into super hibernation and wouldn't wake up without a full power down by pushing the off button for several seconds the switching in back on.
I then started being unable to use other functions, such as a headset in the 3.5mm ports, but still able to use it via the USB port.
At this point I gave up and did a full re-install to 1909 and had no problems since.
How many people are in the position the updates are failing and they don't know, or they don't know how fix the problem / re-install the OS, and so are stuck on 1809 without support or updates, leaving them open to all kinds of malicious behaviours through no fault of their own - owning and using a Win 10 PC doesn't count as being their fault.
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