Customers petition to demand changes to Windows 10 update practices

bobfrost said:

You only need to boot from the usb device if you are doing a clean install. That will only affect a minute proportion of Windows users. The downloaded upgrade will run from your existing Windows to do an upgrade of your current installation. I've done this on all the Insider releases and the final releases, and this release, on four different computers without any problems - one laptop, three desktops. As far as I am concerned, the days of clean installs are past thank goodness!

Bob frost

I have to agree that clean installs while nice are not as necessary as they were in the past. The update process is a lot better and it's been working just fine for me.

Jeff

bobfrost said:

You only need to boot from the usb device if you are doing a clean install. That will only affect a minute proportion of Windows users. The downloaded upgrade will run from your existing Windows to do an upgrade of your current installation. I've done this on all the Insider releases and the final releases, and this release, on four different computers without any problems - one laptop, three desktops. As far as I am concerned, the days of clean installs are past thank goodness!

Bob frost

Well let's see that works out nicely for both desktops and not for VMs or a certain laptop that lacks any boot device menu you bring up by pressing a particular F key like F4, F11, F12 at post time where you then select the drive or device like cd rom or USB HDD option and can then boot live from optical or usb media. Many a laptop only see the optical drive set first in the boot order and no option to even get into the bios setup leaving you stuck with the need for optical and why MS had to make sure that option was included in the MC tool! They may want to dump optical as far as retail but can't stop supporting that form!

BunnyJ said:

I have to agree that clean installs while nice are not as necessary as they were in the past. The update process is a lot better and it's been working just fine for me.

Jeff

On VM you won't have any issues upgrading while a few apps will likely get knocked out and no they are not updates but upgrades you now see downloaded by way of the Windows updates but are still full upgrade installs which some have been running into problems with "As Typical of Upgrade Type Installs" can be! This is why most want only clean installs to begin with to get past any buggyness from upgrading. Your 1 out of 3 or 4 upgrades may come out running 100% while others will be seeing bugs come up a later time. And some are immediate disaster zones! "yikes!!! what a mess!"

Night Hawk said:

On VM you won't have any issues upgrading while a few apps will likely get knocked out and no they are not updates but upgrades you now see downloaded by way of the Windows updates but are still full upgrade installs which some have been running into problems with "As Typical of Upgrade Type Installs" can be! This is why most want only clean installs to begin with to get past any buggyness from upgrading. Your 1 out of 3 or 4 upgrades may come out running 100% while others will be seeing bugs come up a later time. And some are immediate disaster zones! "yikes!!! what a mess!"

That's nice but I don't make use of a VM.

jfreemont said:

The upgrade process (i.e., from one Windows 10 build to another) is absolutely, completely garbage. It causes numerous issues, including not being able to update images. You have to recreate your images every 3 to 6 months because Microsoft treats each build as a completely new operating system. This is a horrible way to do updates.

We need to go back to Service Packs. Service Packs were just very large updates; they didn't do an in-place upgrade of Windows. That's why the whole damn system wasn't replaced with Service Packs and why Service Packs were generally more successful. And it's also why you could upgrade your images from one Service Pack to another; you didn't need to recreate your images from scratch when a Service Pack was released.

I can tell you that we won't be deploying Windows 10 where I work until this is resolved.

Honestly, I don't see MS going back to the old SP method now or in the future. At this point it's just time to adjust to the new procedure and move on.

Jeff

jfreemont said:

That's fine, but the "adjustment" some enterprises will have to make is going to a non-Windows product. There are real options available now with the rise of the cloud. And if Microsoft is fine with this, great. Judging from their response to customer reactions to Windows 8, though, I am guessing they are not okay with this.

The issue with that will be running software that's designed for Windows on say a Mac/Linux platform. Saying that enterprise users will switch is one thing.. doing it is another story entirely.

BunnyJ said:

That's nice but I don't make use of a VM.

Maybe you should! When first having the TP on a VM that was set up there to avoid the problem previously seen with the 7/8 Customer Preview dual boot set up where both installations had to be replaced! At first 8 was added into the 7 BCD as a boot option until the disk errors seen as a result of the dual boot across two OS drives trashed both! The PC Refresh option followed a clean install of 7 also resulted in both crashing again until 8 was simply gone for good!

I missed trying 8.1 out in any form when having been side tracked a bit for some other reasons and then checked out the TP build that was available in January to put that on a VM before going through that other situation all over again! This time however noting nothing had changed as far as hardwares! 10 went on as smooth as silk BUT couldn;t added as a new boot option in the 7 BCD store from being three versions newer! 7 was made a 10 BCD there instead.

The initial upgrade installs on the main build but not the second build accessed remotely as well as the laptop upgraded both saw what best described as a travesty! Both first upgrades were trash! On the main build during the first week the second upgrade to repair the first went unactivated due to bogged down servers. The following weekend then ended like right this time of night on a sunday for the first clean install that activated within a day's time on it's own! Now the activation is seen before you even see the desktop fully loaded automatically if 10 or a previous version being upgraded over saw activation there.

Bot the Home and Pro 10586 editions saw activation on VMs but with the Home VM on the second machine there. 7 product keys were used while the Threshold 2 wouldn't accept any either from already in use or requiring a 10 key instead of any previous version's The VM however is how to check up on things fast without the need to change any physical 10 install since you can run it on any edition or version of Windows from 7 up! I doubt you could even get 10 to run on the Virtual PC 2007 option used on Vista even for 8 or 8.1.

jfreemont said:

The upgrade process (i.e., from one Windows 10 build to another) is absolutely, completely garbage. It causes numerous issues, including not being able to update images. You have to recreate your images every 3 to 6 months because Microsoft treats each build as a completely new operating system. This is a horrible way to do updates.

We need to go back to Service Packs. Service Packs were just very large updates; they didn't do an in-place upgrade of Windows. That's why the whole damn system wasn't replaced with Service Packs and why Service Packs were generally more successful. And it's also why you could upgrade your images from one Service Pack to another; you didn't need to recreate your images from scratch when a Service Pack was released.

I can tell you that we won't be deploying Windows 10 where I work until this is resolved.

Upgrades from the 10240 as well as previous builds and upto the 10565 are those that would tend to see all kinds of buggyness as an end result. As for the newer builds that have been dealing with the bugs from earlier builds the upgrades are going much better even for the 7 to 10 or 8, 81 to 10 upgrade installs. Likewise the upgrade from each build to newer may see the need to reinstall a few things which is to be expected with any version being upgraded in the past as well. Upgrades for any OS can actually end up being buggy at times! Clean installs recommended when possible being the Golden Rule of Thought there!

This is why delivering updates simply amounting to Upgrades! by way of Windows updates can be flawed since a clean install is always the better results seen guaranty over bugged up upgrades where you end up needing to wipe everything and start over fresh again. At least with the Insider Preview no key was required as well as the TH2 now seen if 10 had already been activated due to the DE or Digital entitlement change in how Windows is activated.

BunnyJ said:

Honestly, I don't see MS going back to the old SP method now or in the future. At this point it's just time to adjust to the new procedure and move on.

Jeff

What each upgrade does unlike seeing an SP go on after a year or so of waiting is see an updated build with a number of fixes already tended to but with the more frequent install at this time until next summer since everybody seems to be running the RC1, RC2 stages you would have been seeing with an older version but now are seeing these latter builds out on new machines! You can be sure while the first inventories saw the 10240 other new machines coming ouf for this time of year most likely will be seeing the Th2 build instead and next year see TH3 or TH4 by next summer provided more Threshold builds come out.