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180whenever may not be released yet, but I FINALLY got a 32gig HP Envy 8 Note 5000 upgraded to 1709. I had to: Temp disable Windows update services an
[See the full post at: Patch Lady – finally got an HP Envy 8 Note 5000 upgraded]
Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher
Why is it called “Envy”?
Is it because everyone without it is supposed to envy anyone who has it, or is it the other way around?
For many years I have suffered from running repeatedly out of enough free space on disk, to the point of not even being able to defragment it anymore, no matter how frugally and severely managed it was, to leave out everything inessential. At the same time, disk space available in successive generations of PCs grew and grew and the price went down and down. So, as soon as it became possible for me to do it, I adopted the firm policy of never buying anything with less than half a gigabyte of disk space (and more, if possible) and several gigs of RAM.
Costlier? Yes.
But, if one can afford it, that is what money is for…
And, by the way, any bad news on the Win 7, x64 Security Only update?
Because I am SO fully informed already about the rollout…
Just hoping, barely, by now, that someone will take pity of us Group B and let us know.
Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).
MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV
Other than don’t install the preview update, I’m not tracking any major issues with the A or B updates. They installed at my office just fine.
Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher
My li’l Win 10 upgrade anecdote: My mother-in-law had an Acer Cloudbook that shipped with Windows 10. It only had 32 or 64 GB of non-expandable flash storage. It bricked itself when Windows 10 attempted to upgrade to a new build, getting stuck in an infinite Windows Update install/rollback loop where she could never log on.
So I wiped the thing’s storage and installed Windows 10 fresh. Got it completely up and running, her docs restored (from OneDrive). Then Windows downloaded the latest updates automatically and… bricked itself again. (I ended up just giving her an extra laptop of ours.) How can a company as big as Microsoft with a product as mature as Windows not figure this stuff out?
Hats off to you for your tenacity Susan. Congratulations.
I go back to my request to Microsoft:
All devices sold with Windows 10 should be in a condition that can complete the upgrade between feature releases with the resources they have at hand when they are shipped from the manufacturer.
You are not supposed to want that.
You are supposed to want to buy new hardware to resolve your problems. You are supposed to come to believe that any tech under $1,000 should just be considered subject to being thrown away and replaced.
EVERYTHING about what you have experienced supports this.
I’m sure that those at Microsoft reading your story imagine that it is a success for them, since you both praise their Surface in it by comparison to another company’s product, and you know your tech yet consider installing a newer version of Windows 10 something worth working for.
-Noel
Congratulations likewise to Susan, and my thanks to Noel and Woody.
If a (consumer) device cannot perform the manufacturer’s update after 6 months from original purchase (and Win10 is, we agree, on a 6-monthly update cycle), then the device was not “fit for purpose” when originally sold. Whether that is a matter for the retailer or for the manufacturer ought to be for the latter two to argue about (they can afford the lawyers), but let us, as consumers — whether Home or Pro or other — demand that new devices last longer than 6 months.
HMcF.
No PC should ever be sold today, with less than 1 TB HDD and
if it’s a 64bit OS, not less than 8 GB RAM!
The HDD should be split up in 3-4 sepr. partitions, where the first
partition should always be the OS partition; 32bit size: 50GB or
64bit OS: 100GB!
The remaining HDD space should be used for saving all your private
files. One partition for Data, could be your documents, PDF’s and
internet pages your save for later use, info and notes!
You make your own folder structure in those partitions and never
save anything private on the OS partition (other than installed programs)!
The next partition could be for saving A/V media files, and the
last partition could be for backup of important files, programs a.s.o.
That way you will not “run out of space” any time soon.
Make it much easy’er to administrate your PC and if you have to
reinstall the OS, then you don’t have to backup all your private files
before installing the “new” OS.
Of course backup is a must do!
That should be split up in separate OS images and backup of your
private files!
Best option is always to do this to a external HDD, that is ONLY
connected to your PC, at the time off during the backup/imaging!
Gordon7
I had to do what user UltimateOutsider above had to do with his mother-in-laws. I have a friend that has a 14-inch HP Stream laptop with 32GB of hard drive space. She kept receiving full screen pop-ups from Windows 10 about her version (1511) not being supported and to please upgrade.
She did not have any personal files on her computer and had about 4GB of free space. Again like UltimateOutsider I had to reset the laptop (start fresh to the out-of-box experience). When it was done I had about 13GB free. Using the Windows 10 media creation tool on another computer I used a 32GB flash drive to install that on. I inserted that in my friends machine and ran the SETUP from the flash drive. When that was finished updating to 1709, I had about 7GB free. I also ran Disk Cleanup plus Clean up System (like the Patch Lady) to remove the old Windows 10 1511 files, and that left about 10GB of space left.
To answer you question as to why people buy those machines: its the price (on sale for < $200), portability (about 4lbs) and battery life (literally all day). Those 3 pluses are enough for any technophobe to purchase it. They are not paying attention to the little 32GB eMMC drive that is going to get filled up with Windows temp files and such. If the computer companies could make those thing with 128GB eMMC drives and keep the price ~$250 they would have a serious entry level ultrabook.
To answer you question as to why people buy those machines: its the price (on sale for < $200), portability (about 4lbs) and battery life (literally all day). Those 3 pluses are enough for any technophobe to purchase it. They are not paying attention to the little 32GB eMMC drive that is going to get filled up with Windows temp files and such.
I bought one such machine myself in December 2017. It was a well-researched decision, and I don’t regret it a bit. I was aware of the limitation of the 32GB eMMC drive, and as I mentioned a bit ago in this same thread, I even saw people commenting about this very problem before I hit “add to cart.”
As for Windows temp files… probably not going to be a problem (grin), given that the installed Windows didn’t make it through day 1 of me having the PC (which has been true of nearly every laptop I have ever owned).
With Linux Mint installed, more than half of the eMMC drive is empty, and that’s with Firefox, Thunderbird, Libre Office, GIMP, etc., all preinstalled, in addition to all kinds of stuff I put on there. Even so, still half the drive is available!
Now, I do admit that I have my /home directory on a removable micro SD card, but I haven’t got any programs installed there. My data, pictures, documents, etc., will go there as needed (at current, there’s almost nothing there), safely encrypted by Linux’s ecryptfs.
It’s unfortunate that Dell has chosen to saddle the microSD card reader with a “state of the art” USB2 interface (internally) on the card reader even when the two USB ports on the machine are USB3 (meaning that the device DOES have USB3 capability, as you would expect from a laptop manufactured in 2017), but, hey, it was a hundred and eighty bucks for a laptop that lasts all day on the battery and doesn’t phone home to the Google mother-ship all the time.
It’s essentially a Chromebook in hardware terms, but sometimes a Chromebook (minus the Google aspect) is all that’s needed. Woody has advocated Chromebooks for a lot of people’s computing needs, and this does the same basic thing (gets you to a browser) without any spying or telemetry.
The little laptop fills a niche in my computing “system” that none of my existing (older) gear filled. For all my at-home needs, of course, there’s my desktop; it’s fast, got a good bit of memory, lots of storage, and a big IPS monitor (just one, but that’s because I use my “main” laptop as a second display of sorts), and that’s all the space I have available.
The “main” laptop is a ten year old Core 2 Duo machine (that was mid to high end when new) that outperforms my brand new laptop across the board except in battery life and portability. It lives on my computer desk right next to my regular monitor, and when I am using the desktop for something, I can very quickly use the laptop for some other thing without breaking the workflow on the main PC, very much like having two monitors. I have two mice side by side (used to be very confusing when both were the same model of mouse; I had to change one of them to not go nuts). The PCs are connected via LAN and sometimes by Bluetooth (I use the desktop PC as an audio sink, since it has the good speakers), so it’s not a problem sharing data if needed.
If I am going to go somewhere where I will be “setting up camp,” so to speak, the C2D laptop gets the job. It has a 1TB SSD, so it has plenty of space for general-purpose computing. I wouldn’t want to replace my speedy desktop with a C2D setup full-time, but running Linux or Windows 8.1 from an 850 Evo, the Core 2 Duo at 2.5 GHz is responsive enough to not feel like I am trying to run through water up to my chest when I try to move quickly. Fast storage makes a tremendous difference in the perception of speed!
The C2D laptop is bulky and heavy for its size (14.1 inch 16:10) compared to modern laptops of the same screen size, and its battery life is abysmal, even with brand new batteries (of which I have three). It has a discrete GPU that is always on; no Optimus on this old machine. That doesn’t matter if I am going to “set up” at a place like a hotel room or a friend’s house (the kind of thing I used to use my old Compaq Portable Plus luggable for decades ago). Plugged in and sitting on a desk, the power consumption and weight don’t mean a thing.
The new laptop’s job is to fill in for the old laptop (which is itself filling in for the desktop) when portability and battery life do matter. It doesn’t need to have all the capabilities that my other PCs do… for the roles that I have those other PCs in, they do what is needed well. What I needed was long battery life and light weight, not to mention the low price, and I got it!
If I was more of a “cloud” guy, I could easily envision having my stuff I am working on “in the cloud” where it can be accessed by whatever device I am using at the time. It’s one of the use cases of “the cloud” that makes a good deal of sense, but I’m not overly trusting of data that’s not under my direct control. I sync the PCs at home using my LAN. If I ever find myself with important data on the new PC out in the field somewhere (which hasn’t happened yet, and probably won’t), and it’s important enough to where I would be aggrieved if the data was lost (and a laptop can always be lost or stolen), I can easily toss it in an encrypted zip file and email it to myself.
I don’t have a smart phone, so if you’re wondering, that’s why I don’t mention the role my phone has. My phone is just a phone. I don’t care for smartphones, and don’t plan on getting one. I’m okay being disconnected/unreachable much of the time… when I grew up, that was called “life,” and ya know, I like not being on an electronic leash all the time.
Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)
A great achievement since you only had to delete the software distribution folder and no other essential files. 
I do think you should have publicly called out the manufacturers as the other commenters have done.
No not all memory cards are created equal, nor are SD card readers & their drivers. Had you already updated the Envy’s card reader driver software?; Sometimes card reader drivers are not in complete working order as shipped from the factory and may need replacement.
If Windows 10 didn’t do its thing with such with megalithic updates, but instead used the old system with smaller updates that didn’t amount to another in-place upgrade every six months, this particular problem would not occur. Of course, it would still be questionable at best to sell a PC with two thirds of its storage used up right out of the box, but at least it would be able to update itself.
I read somewhere (one of the tech sites) about a Windows 10 installation that used a compressed image (a feature designed in to Windows for that purpose) to work with the limited storage on a portable device, and it wasn’t limited to ARM devices. From what I gathered from the article, the same technique could be used by HP, Dell, Acer, et al, to reduce the footprint of Windows 10 to ~8GB (while imposing some overhead for on-the-fly decompression). It seems like the OEMs would have/could have done that if they wanted to, but apparently it’s cheaper not to, ’cause none of them have.
I would certainly have investigated doing it myself unofficially (of course) with my own low-spec laptop if I hadn’t bought it with the intent of going “group L” on it. I don’t know how feasible it is to do as an end user rather than the OEM, but the impression I got was that it should be possible.
Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)
Notebooks and laptops can be upgraded with a SATA HDD!
You unscrew the bottom cover and gently loosen the top part –
inside you will find a SATA connector, that is just waiting to be
connected to a 1TB 1,8″ HDD.
Go to the manufacturer’s web site – support – search for Repair
Manual for your product, DL the pdf, and read it or ask a friend
to help you with the upgrade.
Before you get the HDD – take a look inside the machine so you
feel comfortable with the project.
These small HDD can be found cheap, just take your time look’in
and choosing.
If you run Windows, format in NTFS and split up in 3 partitions!
Keep the “small” eMMC SSD for clean OS operation and you
will have a fast running machine with plenty storage space!
Gordon7.
You could purchase a 64GB Micro SD card for $23 at Walmart, and keep it inserted in the HP Envy; then whenever Windows tries to do an update, there should be enough room for it to be successful, as long as you don’t store anything on the Micro SD card.
In fact, the vendor could buy these cards in bulk for a few dollars each, and could include one free with the purchase of the Envy, thereby eliminating this problem.
Hi Susan.
You should also inspect the C:\Windows\Logs\CBS folder and check how much space the log files are using up because sometimes the log files take up a lot of space in that folder, especially when installing a lot of updates. Delete the *.log and *.cab files if necessary.
I just managed to upgrade system like this (32GB eMMC Acer) from Win 10 1511 to 1709 without any other hardware.
1709 upgrade was hidden. I disabled hibernation completely using “powercfg -h off” to gain some space.
I was prepared to delete SoftwareDistribution folder (~560 MB) also but in the end didn’t have to.
Microsoft forced upgrade failed twice without clear reason and always redownloaded upgrade. I tried downloaded windows upgrade assistant (mostly white window) and it also failed (with space still remaining).
I installed all updates with 1709 upgrade still hidden. So I unhid 1709 update. Ran Cleanmgr and after restart blue windows upgrade window started (other apps still accessible). After checking download it started expanding files (“~preparing to install”) to $GetCurrent (something like it) hidden folder on C:.
After that was done it complained about not having enough space and offered using external storage. Now I deleted ESD file(~2.5GB) from Win10Upgrade (something like it) folder. That is the downloaded one it was expanding from.
I actually deleted everything not open by process in that folder = everything windows allowed me to). That made enough space to allow upgrade process to continue (restart and do its stuff).
After successful upgrade windows quickly ran out of space (0 MB free). Turning off hibernation again and deleting previous windows version from Settings app left me with about 10 GB free space in the end.
@ anonymous #187792
Yes agree, eg older Intel Compute Sticks with 32GB eMMC storage use 32bit UEFI and 32bit Win 8.1/10.
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