Windows 10 version 1809 Enters its Final Deployment Phase
- Paul Thurrott
- Jan 17, 2019
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Microsoft’s ongoing slow (re)rollout of the October 2018 Update hit a new milestone this week. Now, the OS upgrade is “fully available” and will be automatically delivered to all compatible PCs over time.
“We are now starting our phased rollout of [the October 2018 Update] to users via Windows Update, initially offering the update to devices we believe will have the best update experience based on our next generation machine learning model,” a new support note on Microsoft’s Windows 10 update history webpage explains. “[The update] is fully available for advanced users who manually select ‘Check for updates’ via Windows Update.”
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The history of the October 2018 Update, which upgrades Windows 10 to version 1809, is convoluted and not a little bit tortured. Microsoft released the update weeks early in order to announce it at live hardware event in October, despite numerous reports of bugs and other quality issues. Then, just days later, it was forced to pull the update after users reported data loss issues. After a second data loss issue, Microsoft finally revealed that it was “pausing” the rollout.
Then six weeks went by.
In late December, Microsoft finally revealed that it was making Windows 10 version 1809 available to what it calls “advanced users,” which is anyone who actually opens Windows Update and checks for updates.
This new, final milestone means that Windows 10 version 1809 is generally available to all users, or soon will be: As the support note explains, it will roll out first to known-good PC configurations and then expand over time. This is the normal way of doing things, albeit it many months later than usual. And it should result in a nice uptick in Windows 10 version 1809 usage over the next few months.
The support note change was first spotted by Windows Latest.