Windows 10 April 2018 Update - What did and didn't work
On April 30, MS made RS4 or the Spring Creators - now finally named April 2018 Update available to the public via Windows Update.
I was easily able to update all of my families machines that were not registered Insiders by simply logging in as me, then running Windows Update.
One interesting note is when logged in with my families credentials the update did not show at all.
The good news is from an update standpoint there was no drama - all of the machines where 7th Gen Core with SATA SSD and 802.11ac Wifi - so the download was smooth and the update process progressed well.
There was some post OS issues however.
On my Intel NUC device - Windows identified the 450MB OEM partition and assigned a drive letter to it - so all of a sudden it showed up in Windows Explorer and immediately began showing notifications of low drive space.
The fix involved running DiskPart at the command line - then selecting the volume and un-assigning the drive letter.
Not sure if this was caused by an issue with the BIOS on the NUC as it did not happen with either of the Dell Laptops I updated - but still it seemed quite odd for something at this level of disk enumeration to show up at this point in the Windows 10 development cycle. The feedback hub had well over a hundred related posts on this issue.
The other issue for me was around OneDrive - again on the NUC. I used to use that device as an Insider device and used to do a traditional Sync All Folders in OneDrive. I then gave it to my wife as a replacement for a 9 year old HP AIO and hadn't logged in to it in months. In the mean time I had some large uploads to OneDrive from other machines.
So after the April update applied I logged back in as me and was walking back and forth to other rooms to monitor the other machines that where updating. When I returned to the NUC I suddenly started getting low disk space warnings for me C: drive. So okay why ?
Turns out OneDrive was dutifully copying down all OneDrive content to the local drive. But this included some 300GB+ of Video - which doesn't work when you have a 256GB NVMe drive. But here's the problem - if you pause or close OneDrive - you can't go to settings to change which folders to sync. In fact this went against the default behavior which is to NOT copy everything down.
I then stopped OneDrive simply tried to delete the local content - and OneDrive said okay - but also deleted it from OneDrive cloud. Some of the folders I deleted to free up space included all of our photos - years worth. Luckily I got a text message from OneDrive stating that I had done a large delete.
I actually had to go to the OneDrive web site and perform a restore to get all the content back.
So while some of this issue was simply OneDrive following the settings I had set months ago - the fact that pausing the Sync - denies you access to settings is just stupid.
And if you go into settings while syncing and attempt to un-check a particular folder - you get a warning that OneDrive is syncing and to wait until it completes. That really doesn't help when OneDrive has filled your drive and then fails.
I've called out Microsoft's Post Update process issues before - especially around items like OneDrive, Store, Update downloads all happening at once with little to no ability to control from an end-user standpoint. All these processes kick off immediately upon login and often completely bog down even a new machine.
I've joked that MS should put up a splash screen during a OOBE install stating - come back in a few hours when I've downloaded your Store Apps, Sync'd your OneDrive and applied any Post OS updates. But the reality is this is an issue and I'd like to see MS provide users with a little more control over this process.
Bottom line is I was able to get all of my Non-Insider machines updated to the April 2018 Production release.
To be honest none of them have noticed any difference in their user experience from the Fall Creators update. They didn't say - hey I noticed a cool new graphics (Fluent) on calendar or Start Menu or Task View is cool and in fact they probably won't even use these features. Personally I think a lot of current Fall Creators user will feel the same way after they update.
I was easily able to update all of my families machines that were not registered Insiders by simply logging in as me, then running Windows Update.
One interesting note is when logged in with my families credentials the update did not show at all.
The good news is from an update standpoint there was no drama - all of the machines where 7th Gen Core with SATA SSD and 802.11ac Wifi - so the download was smooth and the update process progressed well.
There was some post OS issues however.
On my Intel NUC device - Windows identified the 450MB OEM partition and assigned a drive letter to it - so all of a sudden it showed up in Windows Explorer and immediately began showing notifications of low drive space.
The fix involved running DiskPart at the command line - then selecting the volume and un-assigning the drive letter.
Not sure if this was caused by an issue with the BIOS on the NUC as it did not happen with either of the Dell Laptops I updated - but still it seemed quite odd for something at this level of disk enumeration to show up at this point in the Windows 10 development cycle. The feedback hub had well over a hundred related posts on this issue.
The other issue for me was around OneDrive - again on the NUC. I used to use that device as an Insider device and used to do a traditional Sync All Folders in OneDrive. I then gave it to my wife as a replacement for a 9 year old HP AIO and hadn't logged in to it in months. In the mean time I had some large uploads to OneDrive from other machines.
So after the April update applied I logged back in as me and was walking back and forth to other rooms to monitor the other machines that where updating. When I returned to the NUC I suddenly started getting low disk space warnings for me C: drive. So okay why ?
Turns out OneDrive was dutifully copying down all OneDrive content to the local drive. But this included some 300GB+ of Video - which doesn't work when you have a 256GB NVMe drive. But here's the problem - if you pause or close OneDrive - you can't go to settings to change which folders to sync. In fact this went against the default behavior which is to NOT copy everything down.
I then stopped OneDrive simply tried to delete the local content - and OneDrive said okay - but also deleted it from OneDrive cloud. Some of the folders I deleted to free up space included all of our photos - years worth. Luckily I got a text message from OneDrive stating that I had done a large delete.
I actually had to go to the OneDrive web site and perform a restore to get all the content back.
So while some of this issue was simply OneDrive following the settings I had set months ago - the fact that pausing the Sync - denies you access to settings is just stupid.
And if you go into settings while syncing and attempt to un-check a particular folder - you get a warning that OneDrive is syncing and to wait until it completes. That really doesn't help when OneDrive has filled your drive and then fails.
I've called out Microsoft's Post Update process issues before - especially around items like OneDrive, Store, Update downloads all happening at once with little to no ability to control from an end-user standpoint. All these processes kick off immediately upon login and often completely bog down even a new machine.
I've joked that MS should put up a splash screen during a OOBE install stating - come back in a few hours when I've downloaded your Store Apps, Sync'd your OneDrive and applied any Post OS updates. But the reality is this is an issue and I'd like to see MS provide users with a little more control over this process.
Bottom line is I was able to get all of my Non-Insider machines updated to the April 2018 Production release.
To be honest none of them have noticed any difference in their user experience from the Fall Creators update. They didn't say - hey I noticed a cool new graphics (Fluent) on calendar or Start Menu or Task View is cool and in fact they probably won't even use these features. Personally I think a lot of current Fall Creators user will feel the same way after they update.
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