PCA Forums

Wish me luck.

I figure it's a bit too risky to keep the workstation on an unsupported build, so it's time. The gaming system will stay on 1803 probably, until something stops supporting it. If it works, don't fix it, and ALL I do on that PC is gaming.

Needless to say I have imaged to boot drive first (both Acronis & Macrium to play safe).

I expect the upgrade to reset some settings and preferences, like maybe my Windows Update restictions in Group Policy.

I'll list the things that got reset for future reference for those of you, like me, who are on an old build and thinking about upgrading.

Keep us posted

No major fiasco. Upgrade took 25 minutes on a Samsung NVMe SSD drive.

Precautions I took before starting the upgrade, which I ran from the setup executable on a USB installer:

- Since my user is a limited user, before starting the install, I logged out and logged back in as admin.
- Disabled Defender's real time AV process
- In the startups I disabled the Acronis startups
- I closed all background programs
- When I started the upgrade I chose NOT to allow the installer to download driver updates.

So far it looks okay. OpenShell reconfigured itself for the new OS. The upgrade turned Defender back on automatically. Going to poke around now and see what settings might have gotten changed.

So far this is all I've found:

- My group policy settings to defer feature updates (new builds) 365 days was reset, as was a 30 deferral for Quality Updates (non security updates).

Curiously the group policy that forced Windows Updates to manual was still set, as was the group policy to not include drivers in Windows Update

- Task Manager reverted to it's default visual settings (fewer details, not showing all logical processors in the Performance tab)

- One Windows Explorer preference was reset which is the one that groups files together by how recently they were modified. I prefer this off (View -> Group by -> None)

I can't stress enough that, unless it's a new install maybe (I usually don't - I don't even have the PC connected to the Internet during a clean install), or you're installing on Microsoft hardware, you should NOT allow the Windows Installer to update your drivers. I prefer to do that myself, and I've had a Windows upgrade screw up a system pretty good a few times when it installed some generic driver for something.

I shouldn't jinx it by saying anything, but it actually feels a bit snappier, and the upgrade fixed a nagging problem I was having with Defender where the icon would have a red "X" on it and indicate there was a problem, but if you opened Defender, everything had a green checkmark.

I've been on 1909 for several months now. I first upgraded on a VM I use for work, then my son's desktop, then my laptop and finally my primary workstation. Haven't really had any issues.