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On 25 May I was preparing to upgrade two customers’ Win10 PCs, both of which were stuck on v1803, so checked the “Media Creation Tool” webpage ( https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/software-download/windows10 ) and was able to download “MediaCreationTool1903.exe”.
I then ran “MediaCreationTool1903.exe” to upgrade one of  my 16GB USB Thumbdrives then used that to upgrade one of my workbench desktops from v1809 to v1903. I have since upgraded both the customers’ Win10 PCs, and four of my own PCs from v1809 to v1903.
The only problem I had was with my Acer 23inch all-in-one PC; twice after the first reboot setup hung at 30% – the spinning circle of dots had stopped and the mouse pointer would not move – but both times after a forced power-off the Acer would boot to Win10 (which was still v1809).
After the second installation failure I ran a chkdsk scan on the HDD – no errors & “0KB in bad sectors”; I then ran Windows’ “Disk Cleanup” which deleted about 8GB, most of which was in the “Windows Update Cleanup” stage which took about one-and-one-half hours to complete. Then, after a reboot, the v1903 upgrade completed sucessfully (18362.145).

Eventually after a further three-or-four hours and about five restarts it finished installing. Winver now says “Version 1903 (OS Build 18885.1001)”. Seems stable (no errors) but time will tell.

Well – hey; after a further hour-or-so it is now saying “installing 27%”. So SSSLLLOOOWWW.

After I clicked “Retry” and it  (<> 2.5hr) installed until:
“We’re having trouble restarting to finish the install. Try again in a little while. If you keep seeing this, try searching the web or contacting support for help. This error code might help: (0x800706ba)”
Clicked “Start/Restart” (NOT “Start/Update and Restart”) then once Win10 had restarted clicked “Start/Update and Restart”; then the “installing updates” thing ran as expected.
winver now says:
Version 1903 (OS Build 18329.1)

All seems well so far but I suppose if there’s anything wrong I’ll run up against it during the coming week.

I started my Win10 Technical Preview (Fast Ring) system about an hour-and-a-half ago; after a few minutes when I looked at Windows Update it listed:
1. “Windows 10 Insider Preview 18329.1 (19h1_release)”
and
2. “2019-01 Update for Windows 10 Version 1903 for x64-based Systems (KB4488240)”
WU is now saying:
“There were problems installing some updates, but we’ll try again later.
“Windows 10 Insider Preview 18329.1 (19h1_release) – Error 0xc190011f”
I clicked the “Retry” button and now, about three minutes later, it is sitting on “…Installing 0%”.
Could take a while…

I have upgraded three of my own Win10 systems from v1803 to v1809 since 18 November 2018. Have not had any problems and v1809 does seem to be noticeably faster and more stable than v1803 or earlier versions.
Have also upgraded at least 20 customers’ systems to v1809 since 18 November 2018 without problems, however I use a couple of USB Thumbdrives which have the Win10 upgrade files created using the Media Creation Tool, also without problems and in some cases the upgrade has actually fixed problems.

…I tried to move the clip art out of the folder it said Name to long etc then I tried to move the clip art in one folder. And it moved,!! So I tried to rename it and it worked…

Re: filenames / filetitles in Windows.

In Windows contexts a “filename” includes the “path” to the file (all the folder names from the partition’s “root” folder), while the part of the name immediately before the extension is considered by Windows as the “filetitle“.

An example:
C:foldernamefoldername1foldername2\foldername3filename.ext
is the “filename” – “filename” is the “filetitle“.
The maximum number of characters for a “filename” is 256 – consequently if a file w/ a very long “filetitle” is buried deep within a series of folders which also have lengthy names the 256 character limit is likely to be exceeded so Windows cannot properly store the “filename” in memory hence cannot make any change to the “filetitle“.
Moving the offending file “up” the folder “tree” shortens the “filename” – once the length of the “filename” is less than the 256 character limit Windows can store the “filename” in memory so can make changes to it.

Hmm, are my settings too high, the link works but the ‘Upgrade Now’ button doesn’t.

I just tried it (IE11) and immediately after clicking the ‘Upgrade Now’ button the IE11 download bar popped up at bottom-of-page with “Do you want to run or save Windows10Upgrade24074.exe (5.47MB) from download.microsoft.com?”. Quite normal.

That’s strange because I’d linked the Update now and Assistive Technologies web sites for someone on another forum and neither provided…

Well, if M$ really has ended the free upgrade to Win10 we’ll find out for sure before long. Maybe yesterday I just slipped through just before the door closed???

And the free upgrade to Win 10 seems to have finally ended.

Yesterday I upgraded a customer’s HP Win8.1 desktop PC to Win10 (Home x64). There were no problems/errors during the upgrade and when I checked after about 30min System/Activation said “Windows is activated with a digital licence”.

But during the past week I gave up trying to upgrade a customer’s Toshiba Win7 Pro x32 laptop to Win10 after four attempts; four attempts, in each case the upgrade appeared to proceed through the usual “downloading updates” then “installing” w/ two-or-three restarts then a prompt would display “Windows 10 upgrade has failed” w/ only an “OK” button & no error code or any other indication as to what had caused the failure. But I suspect it was because of the Toshiba’s age (about 2009 & originally had Vista).

…As far as problems with restore points this can be solved by hiding the non-current OS partition via a Registry Hack which must be done to each boot partition while that partiton is the active boot partition…

It is very easy to set BootItBM’s boot manager to hide partitions at boot time as desired without messing with the registry or drive letters, and doesn’t affect system restore points.

Also, BootItBM includes “Partition Work” (excellent partition manager), “Image for DOS” (easily create/restore partition images outside Windows, which I have found 100% reliable), and supports scripting (if needed).

Certainly BootItBM is not free; but IMHO it is very good value – I have been using BootItBM very happily since about 2005 when Symantec killed off PartitionMagic.

…
1) is what i want to do possible?
2) if affirmative, will the bios ask me which OS i want run at power up?
3) should i make ANOTHER DATA partition?, or X32 will access them IF i ALSO place shortcuts in the X32 desktop?
4) will files created with s/w running under x64 be accessed in an x32 environment? ((office, and other s/w programs)
…

1) Yes.
2) No.
3) Win7 32bit (x86) should be able to work fine with your documents and other files on your existing DATA partition.
4) 64bit (x64) and 32bit (x86) has to do more with the performance-level and memory-capacity of software/programs. Generally files you create under Win7 64bit will be just the same as those you create under Win7 32bit.

But to run both 32bit and 64bit OSs on the same computer you will need to use a “boot manager” program. I have been using BootIt Bare Metal for many years with excellent results and strongly recommend BootItBM.

You probably need to reset your network in Win10.

Click the Win10 logo (bottom-left corner) then click “Settings”:
45928-W10_Settings

Click on “Network & Internet”, then under “Network status” click on the “Network reset” link near the bottom of the page:
46244-W10_NetworkReset

Win10 should rebuild it’s networking configuration and prompt you to restart Win10 after which your ethernet should be working again.

@ Murgatroyd

I am guessing that when Outlook checks for new messages it sends a request to the mailserver for each configured account. Therefore, Outlook will download emails from whichever mailserver is first to respond, then subsequent mailservers in order of response.

My main reason for suggesting this is based on my many experiences helping customers with their email settings, and from the behaviour of my own email setup. I use Mozilla Thunderbird for my email client but have “Check for new messages at startup” and “Check for new messages every n minutes” turned off because I use MailWasherPro which allows me to delete any message(s) I don’t want to download off the mailservers.

MWP also has whitelist/blacklist functions which work really well. I have three email accounts; the fastest is the account w/ my personal website, the account provided by my ISP is almost as fast, the slowest (by far) is my gmail account which can take almost a minute to check.

Is there a particular reason why you want to control the checking order?

…Also it left a file in the downloads folder from where I ran it and I can’t open it…

You should be able to open that “trimcheck-cont.json” file by right-clicking it and choosing “Open With”. Choose Internet Explorer (or whatever browser you use), or even Notepad.

.json files are usually generated by JavaScript programs/scripts (don’t confuse JavaScript with Java – they are quite different animals).