When things go wrong on an Arm device running Windows, they can quickly go very, very wrong.
It’s all my fault, I will willingly admit, but Windows on Arm has not been helpful in the slightest over the past few weeks. And when Microsoft’s own tools refuse to help, that was the final nail in the coffin. To explain the situation, a Samsung Galaxy Book2 has been floating around my lounge for some time — partly as a great device to read the internet or email quickly, but also to keep up with how the Windows situation on Arm chips is developing. The short answer is not very well. About a month or two ago, I noticed the device was stuck on version 1909 of Windows 10 where the operating system was getting quite insistent that the end of Microsoft’s support for it was approaching. There were a number of failed upgrades that had some very vague errors about bad drivers, which was par for the course with this device. No matter how hard I tried, or how many different things I did, the feature upgrades would fail when they were close to complete. Then a very smart idea appeared in my small mind, and everything went downhill from there. What if I downgraded the Book2 and tried to go forward from there. Bad idea. Disastrous idea. If you ever think about this, don’t do it. However, I did, and realised no further updates would install correctly. It was time to break the glass and factory reset the device. That process was fine, but once again no updates were possible.
