For a few months, I have been trying to get Windows 10 to upgrade on my laptop. I was able to do a clean install via a USB drive, but the upgrade wasn’t working – it’d get through step 1 (copying files), but die in step 2 (drivers setup). The error code that kept coming up was: C1900101-30018. The best description of this error comes from MyCE: “The C1900101-30018 error appears to be caused by software that deeply integrates with the system, such as antivirus products, hardware drivers and software that claim to increase system performance.” The recommendation is to remove AVG’s TuneUp Utilities (which I didn’t have). The ONLY things I had installed were the base Windows 7 OS (from Microsoft, so no bloatware – which is especially an issue with my laptop being the Alienware M14X R2 – Dell bloat + Alienware bloat. What ever happened to a plain, simple OS that you customize and configure and tweak yourself? Oh yeah, that’s Linux. 🙂 ), network driver (for wifi, bluetooth, and ethernet – none are recognized without the driver), and all of the hotfixes that Win7 had.
It occurred to me this morning that my network card requires a special driver – specifically, the
I un-installed the drivers, leaving me with no networking of any kind (but I already made a Windows 10 USB drive before), so I gave it a shot. Windows 10 now is installed on my laptop and is validated through Microsoft. What’s even better is the wireless card is supported right out of the box. Whoo hoo! No more bloat driver!
People may be asking why I did Win 10 at all – namely, for games. I have a mSATA drive and a 2.5″ HDD in my laptop, with the mSATA (which is the larger capacity of the two) running Windows, while the HDD has Linux on it. I typically boot into Linux, but for the times I need to play games, I have a full OS that is capable of gaming within a few seconds. I upgraded to 10, because I needed to do a fresh install anyway – my Win 7 would blue screen on me even after a clean install. I am wondering if that was the result of the “Killer” wireless drivers really killing Windows in the process. And lastly, it was free. I will be locking down Windows 10 when I get some time tonight to fix the privacy issues.
Long story short: successful Windows 10 upgrade with Alienware M14X R2 laptop, error code C1900101-30018 being the result of Qualcomm Killer Network driver and software.
Gomez Development 