Windows 10 blew itself up and is aggravating Me

I hadn’t planned to spend all night Friday and most of Saturday morning dealing with annoying Insider Preview Windows 10 issues. But that happened on my Surface Pro original.

It all started yesterday afternoon when I dug into why some June updates were sitting in the “Downloading” status and were stuck. Reboots didn’t help, just stuck at 53% for hours and hours. So I tried to reinstall 10130 from ISO over the top of 10130 to see if I could do an in place upgrade to repair whatever was wrong. After a couple of hours, I thought I was going to be ok, had two reboots, and got to a prompt that required me to select NEXT. I’d hit NEXT either by touch or type keyboard and the tablet would reboot. Rinse and repeat. Held down the power button to insure totally off. Powered on, got to select NEXT. Boom. Rinse and repeat.

So last night it was time to nuke and pave. I decided to see what a real upgrade over 8.1 Pro might be like for a typical end user.

I created a USB recovery drive for my original Surface Pro using the downloadable bits online. I did the volume down/power thing and booted off the USB and ran the setup. It took forever. And that was Windows 8.0. I couldn’t install 8.1 from the Store without installing Windows Updates. 142 of them. I have a fast connection, but that took hours. Went to bed. Got up early and updates were installed, rebooted a couple of times, found more updates, more reboots. Went to the Store and started the 8.1 updates. Went out and did some grocery shopping. Couple of hours later 8.1 was installed. Went to the Store, My Apps, got the ones I needed. Note that they did NOT appear on the Start Screen with the indicator to download so I had no familiar Start Screen layout. My sync settings WERE correct. Maybe because this tablet once had W10 on it this sync piece no longer applies when you first power up a “new” computer. Anyway, I downloaded the apps and they landed in their designated layout on Start.

Went to insider.microsoft.com as again, I wanted to see what the end user experience would be upgrading from 8.1. 10074 was offered, not 10130, I guess because of all the issues people have been reporting with 10130. So two hours later, 10074 is installed. And my Start menu is replaced by what I guess is the “default” arrangement for Start. My carefully arranged app tiles from 8.1 totally ignored.

Now from within 10074, Windows Update, I have to install the offered 10130.