I find I can’t help myself. A new version of some software comes out as a beta and I find myself resisting for a while, but in the end off I go. I simply can’t resist the siren song of the possibilities of new features in software which is not quite ready for prime time. Currently I am running Windows 10 insider fast ring on my Yoga 2 Pro. This means that not only did I decide to take a look at what is coming, but I actively decided that simply knowing what is coming is not good enough. I needed to actually try out these things that may cause me significant issues with my computer. My laptop crashes with some regularity. For a while every time it hibernated it would crash on reboot. I found out the solution was to disable hibernation. That took care of things. A couple of updates later I decided to re-enable hibernation and for a bit things went well. Recently there was another early release version along the path to the final Anniversary Edition of Windows 10. Now I am rarely able to wake up my machine without it giving me the new Windows 10 version of the blue screen of death. My phone is the more of the same things work and then they don’t. Things get fixed and then other things break. The bonus for me is that I have features on both my phone and computer which the typical user is not using.
One part of this entire process I enjoy is reading forums about these issues. Invariably on Windows sites there is somebody posting how awful it is and that the developers at Microsoft are doing it all wrong. This is usually followed by somebody else complaining that the engineers are working on the wrong things and that they should be working on some completely unrelated software such as the mail app or some such thing. Finally the defenders step in. There are two groups. One group is made up of people who can see nothing ever done wrong by Microsoft. The other group is a bit more sane and points out that this is a beta program which means that the software is unfinished.
In the end I think it’s worth it. I get to see an use the new features. Some of the features are great and add so much functionality that it makes it worth the downside risk. That said I go into this with my eyes wide open. I know that at any time an updates may break things so badly that I will have no choice but to completely reset my computer or phone. This leads back to a prior post about backing up. Having a good backup is essential. I can rebuild my machine and restore my data or I can simply reset my machine in its pre-crash configuration at any time. Additionally so much of what I do is not dependent on the devices which I use which makes recovery that much easier. I am still amazed by the number of people who tie things so tightly to a specific device and ecosystem combination rather than separate ecosystems from devices. This means that I can change device brand or operating system at virtually any time and move on and hardly miss a step. More on that later.
