Category: Microsoft

windows 10 report – fixing an operating system update failure

whbeebe

I still own a Samsung Series 7 Chronos 17.3″ (NP700Z7C). I purchased it in May 2013 with 8GB ram and a 1TB hard drive. It came with Windows 8 installed. Over time I’ve replaced the HDD with a Samsung SSD, and the OS has upgraded from Windows 8 to 8.1 to 10. During the Windows 10 period I made the questionable decision to become part of the Insider’s Program (the part they call the “slow ring”). It’s been a long roller coaster ride, sometimes good, sometimes bad. I was given an opportunity to get off that roller coaster, and because of some really bad experiences, I took it. As of today I’m off.

What drove me off the Insider Program was a constant failure during the last set of pre-releases to perform a download and update. Time after time, over a several month period, updates failed. Microsoft provided no official fixes, and I went looking (i.e. “googling”) for possible solutions. Either the recommended forum solutions didn’t work or on a lot of web sites I ran into popups trying to do all sorts of mean and nasty things. I’ve got a system with all updates and I’ve got a lot of features disabled or uninstalled to harden the system’s security posture. That’s no guarantee that bad things won’t ever happen, but it does help.

To keep you from falling into the same questionable sites here’s what I used to fix the update failure problem and it comes from Microsoft and an official Microsoft web site. Go to https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/10164/fix-windows-update-errors and select Windows 10 at the bottom of the page. This will open up a new section at the bottom for Windows Update Troubleshooter. Download it, execute it, and follow its directions. If I’d found this sooner it would have saved me a week of evenings of grief.

Like I wrote above, I’m off the Microsoft Insider Program roller coaster, and I’m glad to be back on solid ground.

working beyond familiar boundaries

whbeebe

The rubber ducky photo is courtesy of the iPhone 7 Plus, its dual lens camera, and the built-in Apple app. Using the app I selected the the short telephoto, square aspect ratio, HDR, and Instant live photo filter. 

That ducky has been in this house since my oldest adult daughter was two. Out of respect for her I won’t say how long I’ve had it.

I was attempting to write this entire post using the WordPress iOS app on the iPhone and the Microsoft folding portable Bluetooth keyboard. This isn’t the first time I’ve used or written about the keyboard. The problem is I’ve rarely used the keyboard/iPhone combination, far less than I originally intended. I bought that keyboard so that I could write just about any time, anywhere. We can all see how that turned out…

Unfortunately when I sat down tonight to try and use it, the WordPress app was rather uncooperative. It let me select my lovely rubber ducky photo and upload it to my blog, even associating it with the initial start of the entry. But when I attempted to try and write anything, the app seemed to think I wanted to modify the photo. In the end the entry just “went away” from me, and I couldn’t tell using the iOS app on the iPhone if the entry had gone to the draft side of things, or if it had just simply been deleted. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on how you view this, it had gone off to become a draft. The only way to continue to edit it was to open up my WordPress blog using the web-based view in Chrome on my MBP.

I have several entries using this combination, all successfully entered, so this isn’t something new for me. The only problem is I wrote them back when I had my iPhone 6S Plus, under iOS 9, and earlier releases of the WordPress app. Going forward I really do want to use my iPhone exclusively to create content for my blog. The iPhone is an incredibly powerful overall creative tool, the camera an excellent tool for documenting and providing supporting photography to my writing. The Microsoft keyboard syncs up quickly and flawlessly, and works quite well with other tools that need textual input. It’s just that when I mix everything together to write up an entry that the results are less than what I’ve experienced in the past.

I consider these minor challenges to be overcome. I want to “turn on” the writing so that I’m at least creating at least one post/day. I want to focus on the “web log” aspect of the blog. It’s not here for marketing, it’s here to log the next 365 days of 2017. I have a deep feeling there’s going to be a lot to cover. My rubber ducky seems to feel that as well.