Windows 10 preview installation bug hopefully won’t mean a delay for April 2019 Update

Windows 10 October 2018 Update
Image Credit: Microsoft

Microsoft has (sort of) paused deployment of the latest preview build of Windows 10 in the slow ring, and is no longer offering it to those upgrading from the previous build, after these testers ran into trouble with installation issues. Hopefully, this isn’t a sign that the incoming April 2019 Update (as it will supposedly be named) is going to be delayed – more on that shortly.

This all started at the end of last week, when Microsoft released a new preview build 18362 (for the April 2019 Update, aka 19H1) to Windows Insiders in the slow ring. As soon as that happened, the software giant began to receive reports from testers who said the build failed to install.

After investigating the matter, Microsoft has now said that there is an issue with the previous build’s 18356.16 (KB4494123) Cumulative Update, and this is what’s causing build 18362 to produce an error message rather than successfully install.

So for the time being, the new build 18362 won’t be offered to testers on 18356.16, until Microsoft can resolve the problem (although note that the new build will still be offered to slow ring testers upgrading from earlier versions).

Fixing a hole

In a blog post update, Microsoft said: “The team is currently working on a fix now … We will post another update once we release the fix and resume the Build 18362 flight.”

There’s no indication given of how long it might take to cure this particular gremlin. As this build is rumored to be the RTM (release to manufacturing – effectively the finished version) of Windows 10 April 2019 Update, the incident has likely caused some folks to worry a little about whether this could potentially be a spanner in the works in terms of delaying the imminent update.

Realistically, that seems unlikely, though, and any delay caused by this hiccup is likely to be short, or indeed completely insignificant (hopefully that will be the case, anyway).

Meanwhile, the affected testers on the slow ring will just have to sit tight and wait for Microsoft’s solution to be implemented.

Build 18362 still has a few known issues including problems with Creative X-Fi sound cards and crashes being triggered by games which use certain anti-cheat software.

Via Neowin

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).