Aurora R3 1803 update

This model was not tested/certified by Dell for Windows
10. It seems now that the ancient USB3 implementation was
the issue. It was possible to complete the upgrade (for me
from 7 to 10) by watching the process and then killing
power when the system tried a restart. Starting from
power-off, versus a restart, made the difference.
Apparently, a full restart did something different with
those questionnable USB3 drivers that did not occur with a
vanilla Restart. Since that upgrade, everything has seemed
normal - Tuesday updates install ok etc etc. When I tried
the 1803 upgrade it failed in what appeared to be the same
way as with the original Win 10 upgrade. In the same way
as with the original upgrade, watching the process and
killing power when it initiated a restart did the trick.
I think I'm living on borrowed time, but I don't want to
buy a new computer just yet.

Jason wrote:
This model was not tested/certified by Dell for Windows
10. It seems now that the ancient USB3 implementation was
the issue. It was possible to complete the upgrade (for me
from 7 to 10) by watching the process and then killing
power when the system tried a restart. Starting from
power-off, versus a restart, made the difference.
Apparently, a full restart did something different with
those questionnable USB3 drivers that did not occur with a
vanilla Restart. Since that upgrade, everything has seemed
normal - Tuesday updates install ok etc etc. When I tried
the 1803 upgrade it failed in what appeared to be the same
way as with the original Win 10 upgrade. In the same way
as with the original upgrade, watching the process and
killing power when it initiated a restart did the trick.
I think I'm living on borrowed time, but I don't want to
buy a new computer just yet.


There are five or six manufacturers of USB3 chips. At least.

Microsoft was supposed to craft a "generic" USB3 driver,
which incorporates "quirks" for all the brands.

Microsoft does this, so it can rip away the permission
these companies need, to ship their own Windows 10 driver.
It's then up to Microsoft, to patch that USB3 driver
so it works on *everything*.

You need to track down the VID and PID of the device,
and figure out who makes it. If you use Device Manager,
you do Properties on an item, there is in Details tab
a HardwareID, which includes the numbers that
belong to the device.

As an example

I open Device Manager on this machine.

I see a non-Intel "Host Controller" entry.
I do Properties on it, then look at the Details tab.
I scroll to Hardware ID and get

PCI\VEN_1912&DEV_0015

Now, even though that says PCI, what it means is, that
both PCI and PCI Express use the same pci.sys as a driver.
The bus bridge registers or whatever, look the same on the
two of them, so one "flavor" of bus declaration handles both.
Of course my USB3 card is PCI Express (as not many bridged
cards have shipped out there). If a USB3 controller was
bridged, it couldn't (typically) transfer faster than 110MB/sec.

http://pciids.sourceforge.net/pci.ids

1912 Renesas Technology Corp. === Renesas is the former "NEC"
0015 uPD720202 USB 3.0 Host Controller === uses a uPD number
like NEC uses...

Now, seeing as the first USB3 driver was based on testing
around a NEC part, there is a high probability the Microsoft
driver is going to work with that.

Figure out what company made yours, and see if it's
eTRON or Fresco Logic. It took eTRON about two years
to work the kinks out of their driver. The biggest
issue with the other company, was the level of
obscurity (not a lot of people got those, which
means not a lot of debugging advice exists).
Chips from Asmedia, you can be assured lots of
people have dealt with those, and so if there
was anything smelly in the hardware, we'd know
by now. I think my other machine has an Asmedia chip.
Unfortunately, I don't have a native Intel USB3 chip,
as those are the fastest (due to being connected to
DMI, rather than through a PCI Express x1 lane).
I will fix this (some day), by buying a USB 3.1 card
with PCI Express x2 interface, and using that
for USB 3.0 (which should then run at the full rate
and be as fast as an Intel). It means I'll need
at least an x4 slot for the card, and the card will
use two lanes of the four available.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_3.0

Paul

In article ,
lid says...
1912 Renesas Technology Corp. === Renesas is the former "NEC"
0015 uPD720202 USB 3.0 Host Controller === uses a uPD number
like NEC uses...
My machine has Renesas hardware - quite old. And thanks, I
didn't realize that Renesas was NEC!