Windows 10: Buggy official releases

I wonder sometimes. If MS go so through such rigorous insider testing, and their own testing and debugging... do we still get official releases with so many bugs? Surely issues should be ironed out before public release?

I know they put an artificial time restraint on new releases, which can only mean rushed and bodged code. Surely common sense says 'ignore the timeline, make sure it works for everyone first'.

Or am I an antiquated type of person, that believes in quality first?

:)

 

Upgrade Advisor

You'll get the official release soon. Insider builds are buggy, and damage your device. Do not unstall in your primary mode of communication.

 

928 WP8.1 slow and laggy

Windows Phone 8.1 developer preview can be buggy as it is not a final release so wait for official Lumia Cyan update for any performance comparison!

 

There are hundreds of millions of different pieces of computer hardware out there and trillions of combinations of those different hardware pieces. Could you write an Operating System to work perfectly on every combination?

 

Microsoft would very much like to produce a product that had no problems had worked flawlessly for everybody. But Microsoft must face some very harsh realities that make this very difficult. Microsoft operating systems must run on hardware they did not design or build. And the OS must deal with third party devices and device drivers. And it must deal with third party application software that doesn't always follow the rules established by Microsoft. Only a tiny fraction of these combinations can be tested in a reasonable period of time.

All non trivial software has bugs. That is a fact of life that all software developers must accept. Any modern operating system is about as non trivial as anyone can imagine. As long as software is developed by imperfect humans that situation isn't going to change. Developers try to remove as many bugs as is possible but eventually you have to call a halt to debugging and release the product as is. If this practice were not followed we would have no operating system problems, because we would have no operating systems, or computers for them to run on.

 

I agree that quality should be first, these days very few companies subscribe to that idea.

There are some that seem to defend MS because their OS updates fail, and blame is put on the customer. I don't believe in that theory at all, once you have the new OS installed, subsequent updates should NOT fail, the OS is already installed and working.

Instead of small byte updates coming down on update Tue. every month, they wait and do a huge update periodically that is essentially an install of an OS. That model of updating doesn't seem to be working as they thought it would, maybe MS would be better off doing a bit here and a bit there over a longer time rather that all at once.

They (Microsoft) have been used to patching an existing OS rather than updating it to a newer version. There were the larger updates, eg: XP SP4, Win7 SP1, but I don't remember the failure rate being as high as it seems with the W10 OS updates. Quite possibly they're going to need to rethink how updates are distributed in W10.

Speaking for myself, insider builds were fine, the RTM was fine (I left insiders at that time) the Nov. update never worked through WU even though other updates worked fine. Installed that one from an iso, this one (AU) I've had the 1st update through WU then downloaded the iso since I have 5 devices (me=3, wife=2) the other two laptops updated fine with the iso. My desktop fails every time.

Something as fundamental and basic as updating a device through the OS's updating system shouldn't cause the problems W10 users have experienced. I have to believe there are many that are still on the initial RTM, there are many users that don't know and don't care. I asked my neighbor if his laptop was on W10, his answer was "I don't know" there are many, many users that have that frame of mind.

 

You seem to have missed the new concept of Windows as a Service. In order to keep "everyone" on the same "version level" or "branch", they need to overwrite or reinstall Windows -- but that's only happened twice so far (1511 - November update, and 1607 - Anniversary update).

IMHO, 1511 is roughly equivalent to what used to be called a Service Pack update, but 1607 or AU would probably have been called Windows 10.1 or even Windows 11 in the "good old days", depending on what Marketing thinks the market will bear.

Have you ever experienced a "whole number version" upgrade that worked perfectly for every user on every brand / model of machine with every kind and version of peripherals and software? If so, you're probably the only one!*sarc

What they have been doing fairly regularly is to issue a "Cumulative Update" that bundles every major & minor patch, so that every user receives a full set of patches. If you already had a particular patch previously installed, it won't overwrite them. That fits with your "small bite" or "small byte" definition, and they haven't worked perfectly for everyone, either. (See the Windows Live Mail EAS upgrade fiasco - KB3093594.)

But, as much as I would prefer to go back to the days when I could control what updates and patches were installed on my Home or Pro OS versions, they're now long gone and never returning!

And, I'm not willing or able to spend enough to implement Enterprise versions on my home machines. That's the only way to defer installation of individual patches, driver updates, or even full version updates -- but you still can't avoid the branch updates forever, and it's a bear to manage! (That's why I had a team of folks under me who did that full-time.)

So, welcome to the Brave New World of WaaS!

 

While I din't disagree with any of the above, my major complaint is different: when the update fails there is no way to find out what the problem is that caused the failure, and hence no way to fix it other than guesswork and/ortrial and error.

My AU update has failed at least half a dozen times (I have at least temporarily given up on trying again) and every time I scoured the numerous log files for any info indicating what might have caused the failure. Needless to say, I found nothing.

I went to the trouble of posting a message on the Microsoft Answers site, and the tech who responded said to do thing1, thing2, and thing3, and then try the update again. Well, thing1 and thng2 did not apply to my system, and thing3 resulted in the same (I guess) failure. When I reported this the response I got was basically "ask for help elsewhere."

My sense is that something, somewhere, has run its wheels off the rails, and it is not my system that has done that.

 

This is the main point, very frustrating that the failure message is so cryptic and can't be easily deciphered to see why exactly the update failed on an individual machine. The message in the fail pop up, and the log, and an error code, google those and get a million hits that most don't apply to your situation, quite a few problems could be resolved by the user with a more usable fail message.