Try, Try Again

As I have mentioned a couple of times, in 2010 I bought a cheap Dell Inspiron laptop computer. It has held up pretty well with a lot of use. However a couple of years ago it developed an annoying issue. The automatic Windows 10 update process started to fail repeatedly with an obscure error message about data corruption. I tried various purported remedies that I found with internet searches but none of them fixed the problem. I had basically given up and was resigned to living with an increasingly obsolete operating system (like with my still older Dell Inspiron desktop running Windows Vista).  However to my surprise on or about December 30, 2020 the update succeeded so the machine is now running the newest (20H2) version of Windows 10.

Upgrading to a new version of Windows 10 apparently wipes out the update history so I am unsure exactly when the problem started or how many failed attempts there were (it seemed like dozens at least). This wikipedia article has a table showing the Windows 10 version history. Based on this my best guess is that my machine was previously running Version 1803 of Windows 10 which was released April 30, 2018. The next version 1809 was released November 13, 2018 but apparently didn't get installed on my machine. The end of support for 1803 was November 12, 2019 leading to nagging messages from the Windows's updater about moving to a supported version of the operating system. However as noted above repeated attempts to do so always failed with an obscure error message. Whatever the problem was persisted through versions 1809, 1903, 1909 and 2004 as they became available. But it seems to have gone away with version 20H2 which first became available October 20, 2020.  New versions aren't installed immediately on all machines (my other laptop is still on 2004) but apparently installation was attempted on December 30 and succeeded.

So far (with limited use) I haven't encountered any problems with 20H2 so hopefully there was no actual data corruption issue and Microsoft just had some bug in their update process that went away when 20H2 was released. This problem wasn't the biggest deal in the world as I could still use the machine (which was gradually becoming functionally obsolete anyway) but it is still a rather sobering example of how hard it can be for the average person to effectively deal with this sort of obscure computer issue.