My experience attempting to update windows10

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Last year I mistakenly recommended to my daughter to buy an inexpensive HP Stream 11 notebook for her first year of college.  With all due respect, it has been a great machine but the insufficient storage is a negative.  I was not aware that it did not have expandable storage (the eMMC hard drive is embedded on the motherboard and a technology I haven't seen before). When I tried to upgrade her machine from windows 8.1 to windows 10 I had to jump through multiple hoops in order to get the upgrade to happen due to insufficient storage (ie: removing the 8.1 preventing downgrade, removing unused applications and using an external hard drive).

Flash forward a few months and there was an update to version 1511 but nothing I tried allowed the update to progress due to a bug with the update not handling external drives properly. No matter how large the drive I had attached was, I got an insufficient disk space message. I discovered a few KB articles that addresses that particular issue and downloaded the latest fix using Internet Explorer (not Edge, I have no idea what the difference is between those browsers)

I spent more time than I expected locating where the download button in the update catalog download site was but it was ultimately the only alternative because Microsoft intentionally makes things hard to find in their download site and there doesn't seem to be any deep links from their search engine.  It has been a very frustrating experience (but why should Microsoft help competing browsers?)

use IE to open this site and click the link for the "update catalog"
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3124261

the download button is available at the root of the update catalog site after you use the "add to basket" button.


Download and extract the archive (make sure you get the 32bit or 64bit version based on your target machine requirements)

run setupplatform application

I got an error message for different version of the fix regarding a missing file: unbcl.dll

I figured that this must be a common file that is not delivered with the KB fix and eventually discovered that I already have the file on my machine. It's just not registered to use system wide so I found the file and copied it to my fix extraction folder.

copy file from c:\windows\system32\sysprep

run setupplatform application. This time there will be no indication that the fix is running or has completed succesfully so I ran it again to make sure I actually ran it.

No reboot is necessary, so I started the update and eventually upgraded this machine. It's now almost ready for another year of school.

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