Yet another tale of real world computing
:
This update hit my sister's laptop the other day as she wondered why her laptop was running slow. I checked windows update (WU) and there were a number of updates it had been trying to do, but kept crashing. I told her it was updating itself, "which is what it does and you have no control over it". I thought I'd give a proper full monty check.
The smaller updates (1709) popped off WU and they installed themselves without much fuss, once I had decided to dig into it in a less cavalier manner. 1803 appeared to have installed itself already, but since it takes nearly 2 1/2 hours, I realised that it had installed something, but I wasn't sure what. The blue screen of gnashing teeth (the one that asks you to wait whilst it updates) appeared, then disappeared. On rebooting it had installed the cumulative update before the 1803. I went back into WU and saw the dreaded 1803 was pending download, so I hit Update Now.
It downloaded itself very slowly (I was on wi-fi) so I decided to kidnap said laptop and stick it directly into the router. It downloaded eventually and the battery started to go flat. I took it back upstairs plugging the thing into the mains (I didn't want the battery going flat during the install) and it proceeded to install which seemed to take at least 6 months. My sister then told me that it had installed and she had shut it down. "Groovy", I replied. The following day I got a complaint that the computer was running slow again as she played 20 questions with the laptop. I had another look at it.
After several "No" answers the laptop booted into all it's 1803 glory. I got rid of the annoying bits of nonsense 1803 forces on you and checked the drivers. There was a wi-fi update on the Intel site (WU/update driver didn't install these, but I noticed it had downloaded Samsung drivers for no apparent reason). I downloaded the driver and rebooted, then did a speed test. I hit 90Mb (almost wired speed
) download speed with fluctuations down to around 50. Result!
Support is confusing; do you let the buggy and unreliable WU do the driver downloading (in this case it didn't even register) or do it manually?