Pre-Ramble
Many folks, including myself, were and are hesitant to install the now re-released upgrade to Windows 10 Version 1809. I decided to go ahead and upgrade my own Windows 10 System to this latest release, while closely watching, monitoring and timing the entire experience. This article explains the entire upgrade process, along with the problems I struck and had to resolve once the upgrade was completed. The entire process was also timed using the Stopwatch feature of my iPhone.
Specifications of System before the Upgrade
The upgrade process from start to end
"Windows 10 Setup Window" appeared again and the following then happened. Any messages that appeared on screen have been included below in (brackets)
Monitor Screen now changed to a dark blue with the following:
Now a light blue screen appeared with the following info:
(Total Time to get to this point - (1hr, 2min, 19 Seconds)
This time, after Windows Rebooted, I was presented with the Login Screen.
Note: Screen Resolution was wrong. Everything was HUGE
I entered my login password and got a Light Blue Screen fading in and out with the following messages:
I clicked on the OPEN STORE > button. This just opened up the Microsoft Store - I closed it
I then clicked on the TRY IT NOW > button. Got the following screenshot:
I closed that and then scrolled down the first Edge screen and clicked the GET STARTED > button and a Tips tab opened as shown below:
I considered it way too early to rate this app, so I clicked the No thanks button and ended up with the following screen:
Scrolling down the entire list to see what was available, I found the options I could click on were as follows:
I clicked on each of the above categories and there are indeed some excellent and interesting tips, especially for new players, so I highly recommend exploring them briefly. The "Your phone and Windows" tips will be particularly useful for those of you that have an Android phone.
I then closed the Microsoft Edge browser and ended up on my desktop, with still a crappy resolution, despite the settings in Windows being set to my preferences before I started the upgrade.
Issues encountered that had to be fixed
The first thing I did was to try and fix my screen resolution. In Windows Display Settings, it was set to 1024 x 768 (Recommended) resolution, which was obviously wrong, so the problem was clearly that the update had decided to change my graphics card Drivers and Display settings. Changing the display settings to a higher resolution with Windows just produced skewed and unusable desktop resolutions, so I declined to keep the changes and reverted back to what it was for the time being.
I opened "Windows Device Manager", expanded "Display Adapters" and right clicked on my AMD Radeon HD 5500 Series adapter, and selected "Properties"
From the Driver Tab, I could see that the upgrade had indeed changed my drivers to a driver provided by "Advanced Micro Devices. Inc" Obviously an older version of drivers were downloaded and installed by the update.
No driver rollback option was available, so I clicked the "Update Driver" button and selected "Search Automatically for updated driver software" - Surprisingly, Windows reported that it had determined that "The best drivers are already installed" for my graphics card, despite the fact that in the properties window I looked at earlier, it clearly stated that "No drivers are installed for this device"
The next thing I tried was to select the "Check Windows Update for drivers" option and clicked on the "Check for updates" option in the Settings > Windows Update screen, which after checking, stated "No updates available". I then clicked on "Check for updates" anyway.
Windows started "Checking for updates ...."
Despite the "No updates available" on the Windows Update screen as mentioned above, Four Updates were indeed available after the check. They were:
I was prompted to Schedule or Restart Windows Now so I clicked on "Restart Now"
Windows restarted, applied the updates and I logged back into my system again. My screen resolution was still wrong!
I decided to run Windows Update manually again and clicked "Check for updates"
Result? "You're up to date" so no more updates available.
Ok, so I decided to go to my graphics card manufacturer site and check for updated drivers there.
I downloaded the "Radeon-software-adrenalin-18.11.1-minimalsetup-181108_web.exe" utility to self-detect the drivers I needed from https://www.amd.com/en/support
Ran the *web,exe I downloaded above and then selected the driver it recommended I install. I selected "Express Install" and then just clicked the "Next" button
The "AMD - Catalyst Install Manager - Version 08.00.0916" fired up and started downloading and installing drivers.
My Screen resolution was immediately changed to my preferred settings - 1920 x 1080 (Recommended) - during the install process. An excellent support tool provided by AMD!
I clicked the Finished button after it completed and even though I wasn't prompted to, decided to restart Windows anyway.
Upon restarting and logging in, I got a Windows error that the "Recycle bin on my F: drive was corrupted and if I wanted to "Empty the recycle bin now?" My F: drive is just a second 240GB SSD drive I have installed so I clicked the Yes button on that prompt and decided to restart Windows again.
Windows restarted twice this time before presenting me with the login screen again.
Upon logging in, no errors popped up and everything "looked" like it should and how I would have expected it to look after the upgrade completed.
Checking Windows Device Manager again now showed the correct drivers installed for my AMD Graphics Card, and no Exclamation or X marks on any of the other devices, so all looked good there.
I then spent some time going through and opening all of my favourites and frequently used apps and programs and only noted one problem. All worked as expected, except for my Google Chrome Browser, which would terminate for no apparent reason while I was using it.
After uninstalling and reinstalling Google Chrome as per my previous article here, that behaviour was corrected and Chrome stopped crashing.
At this point and time, I've noticed no other ill effects due to the upgrade to Windows 10 Version 1809. If I do find any more problems, I will update this article accordingly.
I hope that this article of my upgrade experience helps others in deciding to go ahead and upgrade to the latest version of Windows 10. Though I encountered "some issues", they were relatively easy to resolve. The entire process, including checking my apps and correcting the Video drivers problem took just short of 3 hours.
I encourage you to share "your" experiences with upgrading to Version 1809 in the comments section below this article. I'd be very interested in reading about your experience and if it differed to my own.
Should you need any help with any problems you encounter when upgrading, please use the free Ask a Question feature at Experts Exchange. I and many other highly experienced experts monitor questions asked and will be happy to assist you.
Finally, If you found this article to be helpful, please click the Thumbs-Up icon below. This lets me know what is valuable for EE members and provides direction for future articles. Thank you very much! Regards, Andrew
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