OK, so I decided to upgrade my plain vanilla Dell XPS box that I bought 2 years ago, running Windows 8.1. Enough memory, nothing special installed. Upgraded using the "Get Windows 10" icon in the tray. This was the weekend of August 1-2.
Seemed to work well initially, everything came back online, only app I needed to upgrade was BitDefender and that also seemed to go smooth. Initial impression was good, glad to see they cleaned up the interface.
I left the box alone for a few days, while I worked on my machine in the office. Went back to my home machine Saturday morning. Suddenly all access to the Internet was lost. Other machines in the house were working fine, and my iPad was happy chatting with the Netgear Wi-Fi, so it was not my ISP that caused the problem.
Spend a few hours trying to debug myself. No joy. Called MS tech support, went through a series of steps with a friendly lady from the Phillipines which resulted in trying safe mode and lo and behold, in safe mode there was Internet access! She said I had to be called by a Tier 2 tech to get this fixed. That was scheduled for Sunday afternoon between 2 and 3. New WIn10 trick learned: use the restart option from the start button together with Shift to start safe mode.
I had a newsletter to write so Sunday morning I decided to roll back to Win 8.1 using the restore point. That kinda worked, except for the fact hat it broke the certificates in both Internet Exploder and Chrome. Those browsers now were useless half the time, anytime an https site came up I was blocked. Funnily enough, Firefox did not have that problem.
Called Redmond again, interested to see if they could fix the certificate problem. Was on hold for at least 45 minutes, and they tried to connect me with a tier 2 tech. The connection failed and they basically hung up on me. Tried again, and the same thing happened. Next, I never got a call back between 2 and 3pm as they had confirmed. Called them up myself, and in the mean time retried to upgrade to Win10, just to see what would happen. After an hour trying, the box failed to upgrade so now I'm stuck with a broken Win8.1 box.
They said Sunday 6pm we will call! At 6 I get an email that they will try to get in touch in 48 hours. But then at Sunday 11pm ( I am already asleep) I get a call, stating that I was not there, and another call a few minutes later that they closed the ticked "since I was not available".
So, my machine at the house is basically half-hosed. I'm going to bring it to the office and have some tech here play with it, they can have some fun finding what broke. Worst case design we will just wipe and rebuild it, and I will stick with Win 8.1 for the moment until Redmond irons out more Win10 bugs. In the mean time, I lost a whole weekend messing with this. Thanks Microsoft.
Tuesday evening - still no contact with MS tech support, they are not able to call me back because of high call volume. A kind soul on LinkedIn said they had similar problems and it was caused by Bitdefender. I had uninstalled it, and installed the new version that was supposed to be Win10 ready, as per the instructions but I decided to uninstall the Win10 version that was still running and my old V8.1 now works as before. You would expect a Microsoft Partner like Bitdefender to have their versions ready and debugged. Apparently not.
