General Discussions

[kingfish]

Microsoft has announced that the upcoming Windows 10 May 2019 Update will not be available to anyone who has USB storage or an SD card installed. The company has published a new support page warning consumers about the change. The site states that users running either 1803 or 1809 with an external USB or SD Card storage device will receive the following error message:

The explanation?

Inappropriate drive reassignment can occur on eligible computers that have an external USB device or SD memory card attached during the installation of the May 2019 update. For this reason, these computers are currently blocked from receiving the May 2019 Update. This generates the error message that is mentioned in the “Symptoms” section if the upgrade is tried again on an affected computer.

The example given by Microsoft is that an external USB drive formerly assigned to drive G before the upgrade was attempted could now be assigned to drive H, post-upgrade. The solution? Just disconnect all external drives before you attempt to install the update.

This Is an Amazing Error

On the one hand, this error isn’t really a problem. Disconnecting external drives is annoying and inconvenient, but it won’t take more than a few moments for most of us (those of you with six HDDs plugged in to the back of your machine will have a bit rougher time of it).

But on the other hand, how the hell does this even happen?

The entire promise of Windows-as-a-service, if you recall, was that Windows was going to become more reliable, with fewer bugs. Firing the entire QA team, forcing programmers to bug-fix their own code, and turning millions of Windows users into unpaid beta testers was supposed to result in a code base people could feel more comfortable with.

(Random question: If a programmer really likes his program, does he refer to it as his “code bae?”)

Instead, we’ve been treated to a comedy of errors that, if anything, seem to be getting worse. The 1809 update was delayed by months to fix errors that could wipe decades worth of documents off users’ hard drives. 1803 had its own errors with drive assignments and could cause the recovery partition to be assigned a drive letter, bombarding users with error messages about how the drive was almost out of space.

USB storage is not esoteric or unusual. Many people leave these drives connected 24/7, especially external hard drives tethered to a desktop system. By blocking 1803 and 1809 from upgrading to 1903 if they have a USB drive attached, Microsoft is guaranteeing that a significant number of users won’t get the update (until they fix the problem). Even stranger, this problem apparently only affects Windows 10 1803 and 1809. If you upgrade from older versions, you won’t be impacted.

It may have been annoying to Microsoft that some people waited for a new service pack before installing a new version of Windows, but I can’t say I feel as if the Windows 10 development cycle has produced any improvement whatsoever. I am, if anything, far less likely to install new updates than I ever was before. I’m not even using 1803 yet on my desktop (installing it broke Windows Search last time I tried). I’ve got no plans to update to it. Why would I? Every single time I’ve applied a major Windows Update to my own desktop, it breaks something. Usually it’s something minor, but it’s still broken.

Personally, I don’t trust an update that breaks something as basic as USB compatibility this late in the development cycle. I’d be very cautious with 1903 and wait several weeks post-release, at least, to see what other problems people report.

Microsoft Blocks May 2019 Windows Update on PCs With USB Storage, SD Cards - ExtremeTech 

[black_zion]

It's even worse than that since Microsoft themselves, since the last borked update, recommends using an external storage device to have the space to keep Windows updated. Keeping a USB drive disconnected until you "decide" to install the update, especially on Home edition PCs, is not really an option.

[qwixt]

"forcing programmers to bug-fix their own code"

As a programmer, I can say supporting and fixing your own code is a good thing. Nothing like learning from your own mistakes.

[black_zion]

Keyword "learning".

Also came across this today, Microsoft is increasing the minimum storage requirement for Windows 10 to 32gb, and that should go hand in hand with that "reserved space" Windows is doing now to "ensure updates install smoothly" after that 1803 or 1809 nonsense. Should put a damper on getting Windows 10 on phones and Raspberry Pi devices. On the computer front, I bet it's going to cause a massive headache for some businesses, power users, and users with 64gb drives, the last not an uncommon thing to still see with SSDs, and especially with people using 64GB NVMe drives as a boot drive, not to mention all the old computers Microsoft forcefully updated to 10 several years ago...

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-10-may-2019-update-requires-32gb-storage,39186.html

[qwixt]

I have one of those cheap streaming laptops with 32gb eMMC, and I could not update to win 10 1803. For some reason, 1809 did work. I basically have to strip everything off the C: drive to get the update to work.

Linux it ain't.

[hardcoregames_]

qwixt wrote:

I have one of those cheap streaming laptops with 32gb eMMC, and I could not update to win 10 1803. For some reason, 1809 did work. I basically have to strip everything off the C: drive to get the update to work.

Linux it ain't.

Machines like those are best off wiping the storage and making a clean install of windows

I have brought this to the attention of MSFT about the tight space of the low end machines

[black_zion]

It really is a shame that Microsoft never learned its lesson from the Vista debacle and kept such low system requirements for 7, 8, and 10. They kept them insanely low to get them on as many machines as possible instead of actually requiring a decent system in 2015, same reason there's still a 32 bit version of an OS 15 years after AMD created and manufactured x64 processors.

[hardcoregames_]

WIndows has low system requirements so it can be used on any handy machine.

My decade old Lenovo T500 with a dual core CPU runs it quite well, that machine has 4GB of memory installed so windows runs well

[pokester]

hey now in all fairness Intel made a 64 bit processor too! it just wasn't x86 compatible! Oops! :-)

[black_zion]

That decision has saved AMD a ton of money over the years. I read an article a while back which talked about how Intel's disaster of 64 bit required them to license AMD's x86-x64 instruction set, and that instead of money trading hands, the license agreement is pretty much a quid pro quo, AMD gets x86, Intel gets x64.

[pokester]

 It thing they had one the rights to x86 several years before in a joint lawsuit with AMD and Cyrix vs. Intel.. I do believe Intel paid royalties per chip for the x 64 rights. I don't know if that was forever or a certain time period, but yes I do remember it helped keep them a float. The lawsuit cost killed Cyrix. 

[hardcoregames_]

Intel lost the Cyrix case, which included multiple lawsuits in both federal and state courts in Texas. Some of the matters were settled out of court and some of the matters were settled by the Court. In the end after all appeals, the courts ruled that Cyrix had the right to produce their own x86 designs in any foundry that held an Intel license. 

Cyrix was bought more recently by National Semiconductor, then eventually Cyrix was sold to Via.

[black_zion]

Cyrix is really weird, in that they reverse engineered Intel products to create their own better products, won lawsuits against Intel that Intel filed, but sold themselves to a company which didn't care and killed them. Sounds a lot like pretty much any game studio EA buys out doesn't it? Even if that hadn't have happened, I doubt Cyrix would have lasted much longer, once Intel and AMD moved to their own proprietary sockets with Slot 1 and Slot A they would have been finished, though I suspect they would have either merged with AMD or reorganized into a chipset and embedded company, would've been better than a lot of VIA and SIS garbage we had to deal with, though AMD just now with Socket AM4 ironed out all the issues.

[pokester]

From the stories I read Cyrix just literally ran out of operating money. They had no choice because the lawsuit drained every last penny. It is a shame because the chip they had in development at the time from all accounts would have been a game changer at the time. Then yes VIA squandered the tech they ended up with from Cyrix and IMHO also did the same with the tech they bought from S3 Graphics. In it's day though just as AMD was with Ryzen forcing Intel to up their game, Cyrix did the same to them. It is a shame though that money and politics at the end of the day win out over innovation and what is best for consumers.

[black_zion]

You know what they say, if you can't beat them, sue them. Found this little slide over at TomsHardware too

[hardcoregames_]

I had one of those AMD 386 processors, it ran at 40 Mhz and I had a Cyrix FPU beside it which gave the machine fairly good performance with DOS and BSD Unix. I eventually had the max of 8MB of memory which was a lot more than DOS 3 could see.DOS 5 with EMM386 could use some of the RAM for upper memory blocks and the rest as extended memory.

[hardcoregames_]

black_zion wrote:

Cyrix is really weird, in that they reverse engineered Intel products to create their own better products, won lawsuits against Intel that Intel filed, but sold themselves to a company which didn't care and killed them. Sounds a lot like pretty much any game studio EA buys out doesn't it? Even if that hadn't have happened, I doubt Cyrix would have lasted much longer, once Intel and AMD moved to their own proprietary sockets with Slot 1 and Slot A they would have been finished, though I suspect they would have either merged with AMD or reorganized into a chipset and embedded company, would've been better than a lot of VIA and SIS garbage we had to deal with, though AMD just now with Socket AM4 ironed out all the issues.

I looked close at AM4 and there probably should have been maybe 200 more pins to support a few more PCI Express lanes. There is some need to support M.2 system drives with 4 lanes and then the video card needs at least 8 and maybe 2x8 for a dual card mashup.

Slots need a lane or 4 as well.