[sc:windows-category ] So Windows 10 is out and so I figured it was time to upgrade my Surface 3.
Of course, this won’t be the only system I’m upgrading so instead of doing the online upgrade (and hence incurring the extra data usage of downloading Windows 10 probably half a dozen times), I instead pulled down the ISO’s.
Downloading the ISO’s isn’t quite as easy as you might think, you first go to their download page but there are not direct links to the ISO files there. Instead you download their “Download Tool” which takes you through getting the ISO’s or creating a USB stick.
You then have to select what version of Windows 10 you want, Home or Pro as well as 32 or 64 bit.
You can select a combined 32/64 bit media, but there’s no way to select “all of the above” and create a single Home/Pro/32/64 install media.
Home the ISO was down, I copied it to my Surface 3 and mounted it.
Running the setup was easy enough, it let le know the Media Center would be removed and then started to do the install.
Which promptly failed with a cryptic “Something happened” message box letting me know installation had failed.
Doing a quick search online didn’t really turn anything up at first, but after a bit more digging I found an off-hand comment about setup failing if being run from a mounted ISO image.
I did a quick copy of the setup files from the ISO to a local folder and re-ran the setup. This time Windows proceeded on to do the actual install.
There were a few other little gotcha’s along the way, but nothing major:
- After the final reboot, the Surface was stuck at full screen brightness and the slider didn’t do anything. A simple reboot resolved this.
- Mail needed all my passwords again and wouldn’t connect to my Exchange account no matter how many times I re-entered the password. Deleting and re-adding my account worked fine.
Other than that, there were lots of app updates to do.
I played with Windows 10 as a Technical Preview in a virtual machine, but something I didn’t notice in that environment was the change to the virtual keyboard.
Previously one of the options was a split keyboard with the number pad in the middle, but this is not longer available. I’m not sure how I feel about this yet, but it is kind of a strange omission.
Anyways, I’ll be using Windows 10 full-timel on the Surface so I’ll do a more in-depth review in a couple of weeks.
