my roommate's new Microsoft Surface Hub is running a wacky version of Windows 10 that popped up a "You need to download something from the store to support this file!" message when I tried to run a win64 exe.
HOW DO YOU MAKE A WINDOWS THAT DOESN'T SUPPORT RUNNING EXES?
that's an insult to computing, you glorified program loader
and this is an x86 computer here, not some weird ARM nonsense.
it's running "Windows 10 Team edition", a very specific and weird SKU
It's the most infuriating and useless version of Windows I've ever used.
and for context I've recreationally run Windows ME before. My autobiography is being written on Windows 95.
It's my roommate's Surface Hub. It's a 3 or 2S, we're not 100% sure yet.
https://digipres.club/@gewt@treehouse.systems/116122905249248331
Attached: 1 image
surface hub
we are currently trying to update it into usefulness
It's a whole different interface to Windows, very mobile-like. You can get File Explorer but it can't view stuff outside your home dir and external drives. There's no windows->run and seemly no task manager on ctrl-alt-delete
oh and it uses a tiling window manager.
here's a video showing the UI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9nAwiS-m_4
Windows 10 Team Edition Demo!
the official MS docs say that the way you get into UEFI on this one-button device is that you turn it on using the power button, then when it boots, you turn it off again, then turn it on again
repeat until it goes into uefi
and when you're using the recovery tool, you have to stay in the room
cause it'll go to sleep if there aren't any people in the room, and that'll interrupt the download
Well we updated enough that it knows it's fucked
The first option it gives you is "buy a newer one"
The second option is "use the automatic update" which hasn't worked for three months
the manual update says you should get two 32gb flash drives.
the first drive will have the Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows (an environment built on Windows 11 IoT) recovery ISO
and the other 32gb flash drive will contain a 3 kilobyte certificate file
I'm gonna stick the cert on a floppy disk and see if that works
I should have a USB paper tape reader. 3k isn't too long on tape
also if it turns out Microsoft has somehow broken USB floppy drive support on this 9k$ paperweight I'm going to drive up to redmond with a hammer and take apart their HQ brick by brick
okay I was wrong, it doesn't just need a 3kb certificate file, you have to use another app to build a DFI update image from that.
so it needs a 15kb file
The file is on a disk now
And I've got an iMac flavored floppy drive to read it with
And we're installed! Apparently the UEFI on this thing does indeed support USB floppies!
Dang it. The floppy was fine, but it's not happy with my 32gb usb drive
huh. I was looking at the UEFI settings and they put "occupancy sensor" under "Radio".
It's not a camera?
there's a recovery image from Microsoft I'm downloading through the Windows 11 Tool but it's downloading at like 0.1 millibytes per slow
tried again, and I think it finally stalled out at 20.39gb of 22.16gb
that was like two hours of downloading ;_;
"If the device was unplugged or experienced an abrupt power outage or pulled power cord, wait at least 15 seconds before attempting to boot from USB."
what?
does the USB stack not come up in the first 15 seconds of power on?
AHHHHHHH IT STOPPED AT 21 OF 22GB
I finally got a version of the recovery disk downloaded, and it boots.
It tries to recover to a version of windows 10 that's not terribly useful, but I think now that I have a working recovery disk, I can munge that disk into a windows 11 recovery disk
hey microsoft you could have made this migration go a lot smoother if you'd just told your recovery-image-generating-tool how to make win11 disks
wait can I just lie to it that I have a Surface Hub 3 and it'll do that?
NOPE it tries to give me MTR
updating this thing is mainly a nightmare because the only updates I've managed to at all get working are the ones from the Surface IT Tool and it can't download most of the images because microsoft is storing the images on a server that someone reboots every 10 minutes or something
microsoft, you know that resuming HTTP downloads has been a solved problem since, uh, 1997?
@foone a constant problem on my work computers, they're forced to send all their traffic through zscaler for "security" which caps it at about the speed of around 1 megabit with constant dropped packets (because though they're expensive as hell their servers suck) The microsoft stuff is always failing and completely restarting downloads instead of resuming (you can force a resume manually on sharepoint at least, but it won't try automatically!)
How anyone uses their stuff by choice I don't know
Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️
Raptor 