Intel Compute Stick / Windows 10 issues and troubleshooting

This is a draft entry to record my issues with the Intel Compute Stick.

I started on Win 8.1 with Bing as it was provided, but managed to upgrade to Windows 10 (Only 32bit, Home is allowed by license) without major issues.

I used the stick primarily as an HTPC device; installed Kodi on it, and little more. Kinda slow, but did work, as Kodi is cool enough to manage a good performance on any platform.

One day, suddenly, Win10 presented an error - honestly I am not sure which error it was, but after reading some forums about this problem, I guess it was a Windows 10 Update Pack (November update? 10586 version?) that couldn't finish and left the machine in a "limbo" state.

Thing is, after that, I couldn't even reset the PC to a bare Windows 10 install (it stuck on some percentage after a long time working) even when choosing to lose all my stuff.

What seems to be working now is the following:

- Created (with the help of Rufus: select MBR Partition with UEFI!) a bootable USB thumb drive in other Windows machine, with the latest Windows 10 Home 32bit ISO from Microsoft. Note that the Sandisk Extreme thumb drive seems to work, while a Kingston G4 seems to have failed.

- I was using a crappy USB Hub 2.0 to connect wireless keyboard and the thumb drive.... It was obviously giving me a headache. I moved over to a wired USB keyboard (as per other users' recommendations) and a wired USB mouse, changed the USB Hub to one with external power supply.

- Also, I was able to do go for the 3 second power button menu (apparently the wireless keyboard was preventing me from getting there) and updated the BIOS version from 18 to 31 (lots of versions in between!)

- Then I was able to select F10 boot menu, chose the Sandisk thumb with bootable Win10 iso and then started the installation.

- On the license key prompt I selected "Skip" (with the other hub/keyboard I got an error that there was no storage available or something, asking me to enter a driver for that; it might have been the issue with the wireless combo USB dongle?)

- I chose to delete the Windows partition and installed over there (about 21gb can't recall exactly). I didn't touch the "images" and other partitions. Not sure what I'll do about that in the future. Don't think they're any worth.

- Bummer! I chose the wrong ISO (not the first time I do that), and I ended up with Windows 10 Pro installed on the Stick - well, we know it works BUT.. Thing is that Windows appeared as "not activated" and with an error that surely would prevent to activate it even on the phone:

- After all, that was not the license I was entitled to; Windows 8.1 Bing is freely updated to Windows 10 Home 32BIT ONLY. So, patience, and did it all over again, this time with a thumb drive with the correct Windows 10 Home ISO on it. I did run the setup from inside Windows 10 Pro this time, then deleted the main partition again... And did the whole process...

- And when finally I reached the desktop and checked on This PC's properties... SUCCESS!! Windows 10 Home, (self) activated!!

SO - It seems to be working fine! Tomorrow I'll check if it does power up ok, will try to tidy up things a little ( more free space, improve performance etc) *and* try to get an image of this thing in case of more trouble.

DAY 2
- The machine booted up without issues; did some performance tweaking, uninstalled some apps and I'm trying to download kodi for Windows.

- I also followed the instructions in this link to set Wifi as a "metered" connection to avoid the automatic download of updates.. Version 10586 seems to cause trouble. Now I'm on 10240.

- Pending is to use File History or anything else to create an image of the system in case of trouble. Which seems to be something very likely to happen again.

- Next thing is to install the Stick drivers from Intel!