Daily Archives: May 25, 2018
I Hate Updates . . .
Especially Microsoft Windows 10 Updates
With the holiday weekend coming up I thought today was going to be quiet enough that I could get back to work on moving the website from the local server up to Godaddy servers.
But it didn’t work out that way. Not at all. I spent the day fighting the latest Microsoft Windows 10 update, also known as the Spring Creators Update, or Build 1803.
I noticed on Monday that the Shipping Department computer had updated over the weekend, but everything seemed to be working OK, so I didn’t look further. But when I came in this morning I had a note telling me that they weren’t able to print out the daily end-of-day shipping reports from UPS and USPS on Monday or Tuesday. These print to the printer in the Office Manager’s office, so it looked to be a network problem
And the problem was that the Shipping computer was no longer on the office network. In fact it couldn’t even see the network, and none of the other computers could see it.
So first up, I went to check out the HomeGroup settings, which is the way the office network is set up., and the way it was set up when I took over the system last year. And I immediately saw the problem.
There was no more HomeGroup. In fact the HomeGroup entry wasn’t even listed in the Control Panel. It was just gone.
And a little Googling explained that Microsoft, in their ‘infinite wisdom’ (do you detect the sarcasm there?) had decided to just eliminate the HomeGroup option. Which, of course, left thousands of networks dead in the water.
There were a bunch of fixes posted online, none of which worked for me. So I tried to back to the old-school method of setting up a workgroup, and then configuring permissions on all three machines, something I’ve probably done hundreds of times before.
But this time it didn’t work, at least not on the Shipping computer. No matter what I tried, nothing worked. So finally having wasted most of the day fighting this, I bit the bullet, and using the Recovery mode function, I uninstalled Build 1803, and dropped back to the previous version, Build 1703.
And after about an hour, the computer rebooted, and now I had the HomeGroup back. Then with a few minutes of configuration, I had the network back and everything worked.
The problem was fixed, but I wasted a day on it.
I’ll lock down the machine to keep it from updating for a while, until it looks like MS has a fix available. Could be a while.
Looks like I’ve got a 4 day weekend coming up. With the office closed on Monday for Memorial Day, I don’t go back to work until Wednesday. But I’ve got plenty of website stuff here at home to keep me busy, along with taking more stuff over to the storage room.
Thought for the Day:
I’m never sure if I have a lot of free time, or I’m just forgetting a lot of stuff.
asdfad
