Get it Together Microsoft – Redstone Edition

In April I had a little rant about how the Windows 10 1511 build (Threshold 2) broke my computers. I was hoping that Microsoft might get their act together in time for Redstone 1, AKA 1607. I was also really looking forward to this update because of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which I might write about separately.

I was on EMF Camp when the update became available on my laptop, so I downloaded it on their superfast internet with the provided gigabyte network (a gigabyte network to the fricking tent!). It downloaded pretty fast and started installing in the background, then went through its normal reboot, on-screen percentages, reboot again, more on-screen percentages, one final reboot… crash. It got stuck at 83% and decided it was going to roll back some changes. I’m glad it did fix itself unlike last time, because I had no way of really fixing it there. Maybe I should have learnt from last time and left it until I got home. Since Microsoft were at EMF Camp and kindly sponsored it, I went to their tent to ask for a Linux install disk (funnty guy right?). Sadly there was no one there except one woman helping kids with robots. So I did what any passive aggressive tech nerd does, send them an angry tweet from the EMF BBC Micro account.

I tried a few more time to install it on my laptop with no success, each time it got to 83% and rolled back. I eventually plucked up the courage to try it on my desktop and to my surprise it worked. The update itself is really good (mostly), WSL is pretty cool and has great potential; I especially enjoyed running .NET programs on Mono on Linux on Windows. After around 5 failed attempts, the update finally installed successfully on my laptop, so now I can enjoy a nice unified experience across my machines.

The mostly part mentioned above comes down to Microsoft weird insistence that you look at their lock screen with a picture of the day. It feels really slow to actually unlock and when my screen is off I don’t realise it hasn’t given control to the password box and end up not typing the whole thing. Previously you could change a registry value and make it always show the password box, but now that is constantly reset because weird Microsoft logic I guess. It is possible to disable it with Windows tasks but it really shouldn’t be that hard.

So the first update broke both my computers, the second only failed on one and recovered. Lets hope that Redstone 2 just works.

Update

It did!