The trials and tribulations of installing Windows 10 build 10061

Microsoft released the latest build of Windows 10 to its nearly 3 million Insiders less than three weeks since the last build, 10049, was made available for testing.

The arrival of build 10061 means upgrades were happening to multiple setups and hardware configurations that I test on daily.

Here is the list of successful upgrades I did after build 10061 landed on Windows Update:

- One Virtual Machine (10049 to 10061)

- One Virtual Machine (leaked build 10056 to 10061)

- One Virtual Machine clean install (10041 to 10061)

- HP Stream 7 (10049 to 10061)

- One clean install dual boot on my main desktop PC (10041 to 10061)

- One clean install dual boot on my secondary PC (10041 to 10061)

- One dual boot upgrade attempted on secondary PC (10049 to 10061)

As you may have noticed all of those upgrades were successful except for the final one which actually failed twice.  Both of these attempts failed due to a lack of disk space even though I had over 25GB available on the system drive and I am yet to determine the exact reason for the failed installs.

We have all heard of disk space issues with some upgrade scenarios and a bug that caused those upgrades to take a very long time. This is an issue Microsoft is aware and it is related to the installation of Language Packs and they are working to fix it. In the interim they have a process to remove those extra Language Packs before proceeding with the upgrade process and free up some space.

There are also two other opportunities to free up some hard drive space for an upgrade if you are installing a new version of Windows 10.

First there is a folder in your Windows 10 main drive called RecoveryImage. It is there so that an upgrade to Windows 10 will not replace the on-disk recovery image.  The folder also contains the installation ESD for Windows 10 which takes up about 2.5GB of the approximate 3GB of total space that folder uses.

If you are not worried about recovery of this system then the folder can be removed to free up the space by right clicking on it and choosing Delete. If this is a test system that you do not mind flattening for clean installs then it is even less of a concern that it remains.

The next folder you will find on an upgraded Windows 10 system’s main drive is Windows.old – the same folder we have seen on previous versions of Windows. My current Windows.old folder on one system takes up 12GB of space.

The existence of this folder allows you to revert your system back to the previous version of Windows and it can be a lifesaver if you run into any problems however, if you are not worried about reverting back then it can be removed as well. Of course, first make sure your upgrade was successful before doing this.

Removing this folder takes a few extra steps and requires that you run Disk Clean Up and then select However, it cannot be removed just by deleting it.

From the Start Screen search for free up disk space by deleting unnecessary files to bring up the Disk Cleanup program.

Click OK to start the initial scan. In Windows 10 this scan begins automatically as shown above.

In order to remove the Windows.old directory you must click on Cleanup system files to re-scan the system drive.

Once that scan is completed just scroll down the list of files to select the Previous Windows Installation(s) for deletion.

Click on the OK button to verify you want to remove the files and delete them to free up that space.

Now, as for clean installing 10061 on your systems that is not possible in the traditional sense of a clean install because ISO’s are not released to the general public for builds in the Fast Ring. Once those same builds make their way to the safer Slow Ring then ISO’s are made available for download and installation.

Microsoft confirmed when they released build 10061 that they would not be pushing the previous Fast Ring build, 10049, to the Slow Ring. It was deemed not stable enough at this point although it is possible it or a later build, like 10061, could be released to the Slow Ring.

That means the last build to be released officially on ISO is 10041.

So in order to get build 10061 installed as cleanly as possible you have to install 10041 and then once it is done go to Windows Update, select the Fast Ring and then upgrade directly to 10061 from there.

It works very well as I can attest to since I have done it three times since the release of build 10061.

Despite those challenges I find 10061 to be better performance wise although it still has some quirks but it feels much better than past builds.

Check out our Gallery of Windows 10 build 10061 Screenshots (53 images)

By the way, since I did get this installed on the HP Stream 7, that means Windows 10 Tablet Mode is about to get a workout so look for something early next week to talk about how that is in build 10061.

So you have seen how my upgrades to 10061 went – how did it go for you?

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