Posted on 06/02/2020 12:17:06 PM PDT by dayglored
Compatibility hold slapped on affected kit with fixes in 'upcoming release'
It's only the second week of Windows 10's May 2020 Update and things are going... about as well as one might expect. Which, sadly for Microsoft hardware owners, is not ideal.
The release popped up last week and we noted that it had its issues. Ten, to be precise. The bork count currently stands at 11 and, worryingly for owners of Microsoft's pricey Surface devices, now includes features the company's fancy fondleslabs.
Microsoft is keen to brag about the "Always Connected" nature of its devices but it appears that some have come unstuck with the update. "Compatibility issues" might surface for gear with "more than one Always On, Always Connected capable network adapter" so Microsoft has slammed the brakes on update attempts.
It also admitted that some of the newest products in the Surface line, such as the Pro 7 and Laptop 3, might "receive errors or unexpected shutdown or restart."
The newest OS not working on Microsoft's own hardware is obviously a little awkward. If only there was someone leading both the Windows and Devices groups to ensure the two talked.
Oh wait, there is. Although chief product officer Panos Panay seems to have been a little more preoccupied with creating vaguely toe-curling product launch videos than ensuring the company's carefully crafted hardware can actually run its own equally carefully crafted software.
Even the recent ARM64 release of Visual Studio Code struggled a little as team members waited for a Surface Pro X to arrive in order to test the updated developer darling.
Problems with new releases (or patches) of Windows 10 are hardly without precedent, although after the lessons learned from the deleterious October 2018 Update and the sheer length of time the May 2020 Update (aka 20H1) has spent in testing (as well as Release Preview), one might have hoped that somebody would at least have thought to fire up the update on a spread of Surface kit, but here we are.
The latest issue added to the big pile of delight is the Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) tool reporting corruption after using /restorehealth to fix things.
Microsoft has wisely placed a block on updates for affected kit for many of these concerns. Fixes are expected in June or in "an upcoming release."
There are ways and means of forcing a Windows 10 May 2020 Update install if it has not been offered via Windows Update, but if you're in the growing crowd of those with compatibility issues we'd have to recommend hanging fire a little longer. ®
A number of folks and publications have noted that Edge is running better after the update. Glad to hear you’re among them.
No they’re not. They haven’t been since Win-7 Pro x64. Everything beyond that has been garbage.
I don't think Windows likes their operating system anymore they seem to be going to Linux (I did that in 1999 - they did have version of unix in the 80's Irecall probably garbage) which means they'll taint that too.
Win7 Pro x64 has long been my all-time favorite Windows release too. I think that’s when they hit their peak, the sweet spot. I use Win10 every day now, because I have to for work, and it’s okay, but I still miss Win7 for its clean, clear, fast UI. Never been a better UI, on any OS, IMO.
I like MacOS, and I like Linux, too. But I wish I could graft the Win7 UI on top of them....
Not necessarily. XENIX (SCO Unix) was the best-selling, and extremely well-thought-of, Unix that Microsoft had as its flagship OS from the late 70’s into the mid 80’s.
At that time, they considered Unix their “real multi-user” operating system, whereas MS-DOS was viewed largely as a “single-user toy” within MS. Things changed after the Apple Macintosh, when MS realized they needed to come out with Windows, and they sold XENIX to SCO. They then concentrated on OS/2 and later NT, as their “serious” operating systems.
REGISTER was v hot on the scene when they splashed in 2006. I will be paying more attention to them. A spartan, minimalist website for sure.
“They then concentrated on OS/2”
The good old pre-internet days. 1992 I was working for Ross Perot. A co-worker was holding his off the shelf retail box that read OS/2/Warp on the outside. He proceeded to unload his critique of me. Fun times! I knew jack about computers back then. These days I put/upgrade nvme into laptops and sell them.
The nice thing is, with regard to tech topics, they're almost always the first with breaking news, they nearly always get it right the first time, and when they don't, or updates appear, they are the first to correct themselves.
Very refreshing.
Register are Brits. Life is always more minimalist there compared to the US. Have I lived there? Yes I have for three months.
Your description.... Reg sounds painfully honest. In the good ways.
That's just the general style of the Register. Read any of their articles. They are pretty much all like that.
I have both a Pro 7 and a Laptop 3. No problems at all with the recent updates.
The problem with articles like this is they only talk about the scope and never the REACH. Yes, some system are affected, but hardly all, only a small minority of them.
Why is this?
It could be hardware. It could be software. It could be configuration.
But who am I kidding?
I can’t stop the crying from the “hate Microsoft” crowd, so believe what you all will.
The new Edge browser is totally redone with Google Chrome. Basically, Microsoft leased their Chrome engine and the official name is Edge Chromium.
https://www.lifewire.com/what-it-is-chromium-edge-4842127
I use it on all my devices. Faster than Google Chrome, because it doesn’t have all the Google Web tracking.
Microsoft suffers from the fact that they have a near monopoly on billions of machines, and every single one of those machines is in the hands of someone other than Microsoft, often someone with no knowledge of their computer other than turning it on and firing up a web browser, or maybe Word.
So while only a minority of systems are affected by most update issues, the overall number of systems is so huge that even 1% translates into millions of frustrated users.
I post the tech articles about such issues because FReepers are my online FRiends, and I hope that by taking 10 minutes to post a thread on a Windows issue, I can save some FReeper an hour of annoyance.
> I can’t stop the crying from the “hate Microsoft” crowd
Neither can I. The fact that Windows threads inevitably draw anti-MS/anti-Windows comments is unavoidable. Hopefully the value of the threads to affected users outweighs the whining.
Thanks for your Edge comments.
Very helpful.
Let’s stick to the issue in your post.
Except for Surface and XBox, Microsoft sells software.
99% of the machines that use Windows are manufactured by some other company.
And of these, client systems running Windows still make up the vast preponderance of computers in customer hands. I am well aware that most issues involving THESE systems are operator error and cheap hardware. Yet people blame the software company, and rarely themselves or the hardware manufacturer.
Even for people who only buy Macs or Apple computers, when they run a Windows sandbox, Microsoft is getting the same $$$ lease money as they do for Dell. Why don’t these Windows sandboxes on Apple break, if it is Microsoft’s crappy software? I’ll bet you can’t answer that.
You cannot compare a separate software product on a different hardware set to Apple’s model of OS&HW.
Surface, which is what this article is about, shouldn’t ever have a flaw. Yes, it is a good article to post, but my point is you are confabulating the OS with the hardware when you start talking about Microsoft in general.
Some Surfaces failed, and some of these people should be compensated from Microsoft.
I actually had very high hopes for the Surface laptops, almost bought one, but didn't have an excuse large enough to justify the cost. (I already have lots of computers, too many, some would say...)
I've always been willing to cut Microsoft slack for the fact that their software runs on other people's hardware, and is operated mostly by people who don't understand it. As you say, that's not the case for this article.
I'm willing to cut them about as much slack on their own hardware as I'm willing to cut Apple on their hardware. That is, mistakes happen, bugs slip through QA, sh*t happens. The idea is to rapidly acknowledge and fix it.
With regard to running Windows in a VM on (say) Apple or other hardware/OS combinations, I've overall had FAR fewer problems in that mode, compared to Windows on any metal. And yet you would think that inserting an additional, complicated variable (VMware, VirtualBox, etc.) ought to INCREASE the problems. But surprise, Windows runs just fine as a VM. Go figure.
If you think about the hardware set a VM uses, it then makes sense. It is either a synthetic device or an emulated one. Emulated devices use the host’s kernel, and synthetic drivers go through/use a hypervisor that is under the kernel and therefore doesn’t need to wait for kernel mode interrupts. But in either case, there is only one video driver, one sound driver, one keyboard/mouse driver, etc., etc.
I think this points to the hardest thing the software has to do is perfectly map hardware’s primitives, I.e., machine code instructions, when there is so much disparate hardware out there. And then add to that that different assemblages of hardware can further muddle up driver code that would be fine by itself.
Aside from operator error, this is the hardest thing to test for. Who knew that one guy would still be using that piece of crap, cheap Chinese scanner and how it’s driver had to fake out some interrupt needed by every component ?
Over my years as a system design engineer I had to "fake out" more bizarre crap than you can imagine, or maybe you can. :-)
Abstraction layers, wrappers around wrappers around driver code, translation tables, yikes. You obviously know what I'm talking about.
Emulating interrupt handling was a lot harder in the old days when CPUs were a literally thousand times slower. That was one reason I preferred the 6502 to the 6800 for real-time interrupt handling. The 6800 pushed every register onto the stack before entering the interrupt service routine, which took quite a while, whereas the 6502 just pushed the PC and status register, so you could get to handling the interrupt faster. Of course if you needed other registers in the handler you had to push them first, but that encouraged the handler writer to get the necessary stuff done with as few registers as possible, do the RTI, and get back to mainline. For the same clockrate I could get a 6502 to handle a small interrupt service task in less than half the time of the 6800.
Ah, those were the days.... :-)
About that update. I just saw it for the first time and am hesitant to download and install.
Should I hold off or install? Will it mess up or change the way I do things now?
Thanks!!
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