Windows 10 Third Try

If you are one of the many who chose NOT to update their Windows computer to Windows 10, let me describe a few things you may have missed, based on my own experience.

On the day that Windows 10 Update was released to the public – July 29, 2015, I updated my Windows 8.1 computer. There were bugs.

Music and videos had no sound. The computer could only produce Windows system sounds, and they went to my secondary monitor (my TV) despite the Sound applet showing that my primary monitor was selected.

Applications not compatible with Windows 10 had been removed. These included Windows calculator, a program seemingly so simple that one wonders how it could be incompatible with anything.

I couldn’t keep Firefox as my default browser; Windows 10 preferred the new Microsoft Edge. I could tell Windows that Firefox was my default browser, but Windows 10 simply ignored my instructions and used Edge.

I could have gone into debugging mode and tried to fix these problems. And maybe I would have fixed them, and maybe I would have made things worse. So I chose to roll-back my system to Windows 8.1. That was easy and quick and my computer issues were gone. I decided to give Microsoft six months to iron the bugs out of Windows 10 and I would try the installation again.

Six months later I did try again. The second update had a very different outcome compared to the first. This time, most of my Desktop icons – shortcuts, files, and folders went missing from the Desktop. My Desktop wallpaper image was also missing. When I checked my Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos, and Downloads folders, they were all empty. I went online to ask the question, “After Windows 10 update where are my documents?” I found many other users with the same problem. A Microsoft MVP explained that to get back the missing files I should go to the old Windows system, (in the folder “Windows.old”) and drill down to those folders (documents, etc.) and copy their contents over to the new Windows folders. But when I tried to do that, I found that all my old Windows folders were empty, too. So where were all my files?

Again, I rolled back to Windows 8.1 and got everything back. So far I was not impressed with Windows 10 but I was impressed with the roll-back feature. It had worked flawlessly, twice.

Time passed and the final day for the free update to Windows 10 arrived – July 29, 2016. Dare I tempt fate and try another update?

Call it scientific curiosity, call it “finishing-the-story”, call it crazy, but I decided to try the update one more time. I didn’t have a good feeling about it, but I had to do it.

I started the update process and it took an hour and 50 minutes to complete. When the computer rebooted for the final time, the Desktop looked promising. All my Desktop icons were there. My Desktop background image was there. During the final boot-up, I had noticed one glitch. I have a Reminder program that I wrote a few years ago, during the days of Vista. I wrote it to run on XP and anything newer. But on Windows 10 it gives an “Access Denied” error. I have another PC – a little notebook/tablet – that came with Windows 10 installed and it runs my Reminder program with no problem, so I knew this problem was with the Windows 10 update and not with my software.

There were other problems, of course. My computer is Bluetooth-capable, and sometimes that is a useful feature. But Windows 10 said my suite of Bluetooth software was incompatible with Windows 10.

Next, I tried to play a video. Media Player opened and began playing the video, but the sound was in Spanish. That isn’t unusual; many videos are bi-lingual. Ordinarily I would go to the System Tray and right click my a/v splitter (I use the Haali splitter) and select English and turn off subtitles. But the icon for the Haali splitter was not in the System Tray. I hunted around for it, but couldn’t find it. So I closed Media Player. The audio kept going. I opened the Task Manager, thinking that somehow Media Player was still running and I could close it from there, but Task Manager showed that Media Player was not running. I scrolled down to the background audio tasks (there were 4 of them) and closed all 4, but the sound kept going. It was as if there was a bit of code that hadn’t been cleaned up when I closed Media Player, and that bit of code was still running, orphaned from the rest of the system. The only way I could kill the audio was to restart my PC.

I was not interested in finding what other potholes the update had prepared for me. I wrote down my Windows 10 product key for the remote chance I needed to re-install Windows 10, and then I initiated a roll-back to Windows 8.1. The roll-back took 15 minutes and worked flawlessly. I had given Windows 10 three chances to show what it could do. Now, I was back in my comfort zone with a computer that just worked. I’ve no doubt there is a Windows 10 desktop computer in my future, but I’ll take my time getting there.