In reply to a post by RobertoS:

For a long time I thought it was some new gadget for Win 10 and the thread had got side-tracked.

The new gadget is "win-fi-ws". Windows turns wi-fi cards into wireless hotspots and streams the World Service. Version 10.

That sounds plausible. But ...

w(hat)
i(f)
n(o-one)
f(inds)
i(t)
w(ill)
s(tream)

?

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

6000+ installations over 25 years. That's 240 per year. Over one per working day. Plus all the configuring and setting up, plus sorting out any problems.

For a desktop engineer that isn't that bad to be honest. When I used to do that I could easily be installing 200 machines a month and supporting many more. You can quite happily install 30 in a day. I wouldn't have fancied doing it for 25 years but it isn't an unreasonable number to tout about - 20 odd a month is nothing.

In reply to a post by Pipexer:

Really? Funny I installed it on many machines and didn't have any real problems. Oh and by the way Windows Server 2016 Beta 3 and 4 work quite well too.
Maybe you are doing something stupid with it...

There are definitely some issues with Win 10. I have currently installed on 2 PCs - one had problems with a couple of updates before the install but has worked flawlessly ever since. The other was a pretty new tablet with no "special" config and it worked fine for a while but then started refusing to download anything from either the store or windows update - just gets an error code for which there was no fix at the time, I haven't used it for a few months so don't know if it has been fixed - some day I will get around to rebuilding it.

Of course, many of these are concurrent builds. No one sits there watching the whole installation progress. Some were multiple test installs on different hardware with the latest build of the beta O/S which were downloaded from the US almost every day. Later, when working at a major news organisation, there were a lot of remote installs from RIS Servers. Windows installations are often the most boring thing to do and I'd totally agree I wouldn't want to do it constantly. Fortunately, these were peaks and troughs in those 25 years.

25 years worth of installs makes you an installer not a developer/writer.

It used to take longer when Windows came on 30-odd floppies. But you could still do several at a time; it just got a bit boring swapping floppies.

Before we had any official cloning/remote build software I wrote my own using assembler and various standard DOS utilities. That way we built one PC and then took the hard disk out and cloned it onto others - one weekend my team of 3 people cloned 100's of PCs using that method - and they were Win 95 at that point (we had to rebuild them all as the supplier screwed up the build on them and we needed them urgently).

So are you saying that W10 is ONLY for business users, that require some overpaid nerd that should be configuring using a server connection to save time and effort, and is not for home users that have less idea about an OS that should be configured to make it work?

You don't know what I do so don't presume you know me!

In reply to a post by ian72:

In reply to a post by Pipexer:

Really? Funny I installed it on many machines and didn't have any real problems. Oh and by the way Windows Server 2016 Beta 3 and 4 work quite well too.
Maybe you are doing something stupid with it...

There are definitely some issues with Win 10. I have currently installed on 2 PCs - one had problems with a couple of updates before the install but has worked flawlessly ever since. The other was a pretty new tablet with no "special" config and it worked fine for a while but then started refusing to download anything from either the store or windows update - just gets an error code for which there was no fix at the time, I haven't used it for a few months so don't know if it has been fixed - some day I will get around to rebuilding it.

Oh of course there are issues.... it doesn't make it beta though

WIndows Update has always been one of the slightly "less reliable" features of Windows since quite a while ago but for what it does it isn't too bad. Windows 7 and Windows 8 have had similiar annoying bugs.