I just noticed how long it has been since I publish one of these. Not that anyone visits this site at the moment, but eventually that may change so I must be more proactive.
Thankfully I don’t need the latest, most up-to-date version of Windows to do that. Previous blog entries have referred to the nightmarish experience of getting Windows 10 update 1803 working. For those who are unaware, the numbering scheme for Windows 10 updates used to be the last 2 digits of the year (so, 2018 in that case), and the 2 digit month code of a month somewhere around the release. (Thus, 1803 was supposedly released in March of 2018, though it was called the April release, and the roll-out didn’t happen until 8 May.)
After that, we had 1809 in October 2018, 1903 in May 2019, 1909 on 12 November 2019, and… I can’t believe that I didn’t write some blog entries about that because 1909 was another example of continually failed updates which ran on into the first half of 2020. I did in fact have some of my user files relocated on my D drive because of a lack of space on the C one. This was finally too much for poor little Windows Update to bear, and me as well. I bit the bullet and installed a significantly larger C drive upgrade and did a complete reinstall of Windows in early 2020.
Then we had release 2004 in May 2020, and then Microsoft changed the naming pattern. Since the month digits in past releases really bore no relation to the actual release month anyway, they’ve replaced it with “H” followed by the half of the year so that the one released at the end of 2020 was 20H2.
The installation of 20H2 on my machine would get to the 61% mark then stop. It wouldn’t fail; it would just not proceed beyond that point.
Why? Because I had Sennheiser drivers installed on my system. And because Microsoft, who control the entire operating system, could not program a way around incompatibility between those drivers and the update, nor could they give a descriptive error message to explain why the update was always failing. Oh no, as always you have to go hunting through the Internet hoping that you will stumble upon a solution. Which, eventually, I did. That was of course in April 2021 so obviously there really wasn’t enough in the 20H2 release to make me bother before then. Apparently you can have either a light or dark colour scheme behind your start menu now. That’s about all. I mean, I know that there were other updates and changes in 20H2, but believe it or not they were all even less significant than that one. Still, you do have to keep your Windows version up-to-date because someday there may be an important update.
If you have a Sennheiser headset, all you need to do is delete these, do the upgrade, reinstall the Sennheiser software, fix whatever settings need to be fixed to agree with how you had them before, and you’ll be on your way again.
