[GTALUG] update to Win 10, a war story

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sat, Apr 09, 2016 at 11:23:10AM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> I have a few tiny computers with Windows 8.x.  They came with 2G of
> RAM and 32G of m.2 SATA SSDs.  (A raft of systems were produced with
> these specs since the Windows licensing fees were essentially waived
> when these limits were observed.)
> 
> 2G RAM + 32G HDD is actually a useful size for normal Linux distros.
> But there's not enough room for dual booting with Windows.
> 
> I wanted to update to Windows 10
> 
> (1) before the deadline for free updates
> 
> (2) because I could then wipe Windows and install linux without losing
>     the ability to go back to licensed Windows.  Note that the Windows
>     10 license authentication is based on Microsoft cloud records but
>     previous versions require a magic code (that is no longer printed
>     on the device) (I recently found out that it is in the ROM of
>     these machines and can be discovered from Linux).
> 
> For the life of me, I could not get one of the machines to update.
> The update process kept making disk demands that were impossible
> to fulfill on a 32G disk.  I've been trying off and on for months.
> I've spent a couple of hours on the phone with HP and Microsoft support.
> 
> I just solved the problem.  I had installed an extra 8G of RAM in the
> machine.  Once I removed it, Windows was happy to update.
> 
> There was NO hint of this in any of the diagnostics.  None of the
> support folks brought it up.
> 
> Sheesh.  Every time I muck with Windows I find new reasons not to
> touch it.

I wonder if the extra ram meant the default pagefile size got much bigger
in order to allow hibernation.

-- 
Len Sorensen