Firstly I apologise for this verbose story , but , I think it may share with others that the problems they have faced are not always of their own volition as some of the assistive replies may suggest. I am a Microsoft user since the first DOS and was brought
up on DGs and floppy disks pre Winchester era.
I am a computer and software professional, my living depends on how I manage my systems and the data it contains, and to date I have followed best practices of maintaining data and structure and strongly advocated others to follow the advice of updating
their systems regularly and maintaining a clean system. however , like others here the last update completely killed my home machine.
However I had cloned the hard disk ( three times at various time intervals as I had old hard disks available ) and also had stored recovery points and regular backups. I was ready...not !!. The recovery process did not function correctly, I could only
restart in safe mode, I installed the most recent clone hard disk , that was updated with the new update and it was destroyed. I had done my Chkdsk and sfc options on the clone before I connected to the internet so there were no errors.
So back I went to Clone 2, except I then re-cloned this update so I would not have to go further back than needed if it arrived at the same outcome if and when it updated. Lo and behold it did, and again wipe out the system again, unable to reboot unless
in safe mode.
However when once again re cloning the hard disk I verified again that there were no disk or structure issues, fully reformatting it before cloning . So I tested this disk again off the internet and it performed perfectly in all bios and hard disk integrity
testing.
Finally I looked at the log of my original clone and it was when I updated to windows 10 from windows 8 , so again I cloned this and ensured that everything was functioning , I blocked all updates to the new disk , and , it works perfectly, true I don't
get updates , but it works .
One could argue that the later versions became corrupted and I thought the same , so , being an engineer who likes a technical challenge I cloned the original again , and let Windows do its thing, updating merrily , after numerous updates and resetting
restarting and working away ,
I returned with my cup of coffee to find, it had failed again and it was stuck in the same loop.
After 6 weeks of spending spare time redoing this numerous times , I have spent enough of my time.
So I now cloned the upgraded original and that's it , I bat away everything I can from Microsoft for updates. Disappointed is probably the best I can say, but honestly if I performed to the standard Microsoft perform I would be justifiably fired from all
the support and engineering contracts I have.
I get it if Microsoft want to upgrade the systems that makes older models before 2015 redundant, sometimes backwards compatibility to legacy systems means that the upgrades become overly cumbersome and ineffective. However that does not permit them to just
release poor options , have the courtesy and business acumen to at least tell your consumers, and have the forethought to allow them to choose to not upgrade the software. But hey ,,, what am I saying , this is Microsoft 2019