Thursday 13 August 2015

Windows 10 Wireless missing 5GHZ networks (TL-WDN3200 N600 TP-LINK)

After upgrading to Windows 10 on my home PC, I realised that it was no longer able to connect to my 5ghz network using my TL-WDN3200 dongle. The wireless network list didn't even display it.

On further investigation i decided it must be a driver issue, so i went over to the TP-LINK website and downloaded the latest driver set (for Windows 8.1 x64 as at the time of writing there were no Windows 10 drivers available). I installed the drivers, but the network still didn't appear.

Upon closer inspection I identified that the USB dongles chipset maker was Mediatek, so I headed off to their website and downloaded their drivers.

Straight after installing, I had access to my 5ghz network again. Must be a bug or inconsistency with the tp-link/builtin/windows 10 drivers

The URL for the mediatek drivers is: http://www.mediatek.com/en/downloads1/downloads/usb/

-- Update April 2016 --

TP-Link still haven't got this sorted yet and there are lots of complaints about it on their forums. They have released a Windows 10 compatibility list here: http://www.tp-link.com/en/article-15587.html but it doesn't look like the WDN3200 is going to get a new driver in the near future!

Tuesday 4 August 2015

Windows 10 upgrade - setup has failed to initialize the working directory

I recently updated a ASUS Transformer tab to Windows 10 but during the update process recieved the following message:

setup has failed to initialize the working directory

After looking into the problem, I was able to determine that it was related to the amount of free space on the drive (the Transformer only has a 32gb SSD and I had less than 7GB free)

I cleared some space (just over 10GB) and re-ran the update without issue

Hope it helps someone

Update: 
When you do finally get past this error, if you don't have over 10GB free the update will ask you to either free up more space or plug in an external USB HDD - which is what I did to get around this. Once the update was complete and you definitely didn't need to rollback you can wipe the external.