[Solved] Slow Windows 10 installation via USB thumbdrive

Was installing a fresh copy of Windows 10 on a new SSD (yep, wanted to avoid the windows 8.1 baggage so went this path)...

Unfortunately, the installation was SLOW!!! it took more than 12 hours to get to the screen where you can choose which drive to setup the Windows OS on.

Yes, more than 12 hours.

After I tried to create a partition on the new SSD, it went through a super super super slow motion of working, I gave up. It just doesn't make sense that a Windows 10 install would take 2 days (ok, i was out for half a day on day 1 so it could have been "faster").

I Googled and realized that this was mentioned on many forums such as tom's hardware, bleeping computer, and so on.

I force shutdown the PC. Unplugged all the 5 other harddisks on the system and tried installation again.

This time, it took less than 10 minutes and the PC was booting up from the new C:\ on the SSD.

SSD - Samsung 850 Evo
Motherboard - Old Asus motherboard (pre 2010 era), with the first generation Intel core i7 cpu.
USB thumbdrive was a USB3 Sandisk Extreme Pro 64GB drive plugged into a USB2 port on the system (yeah, the thought crossed my mind that it could be due to USB2, but USB2 is not this slow.. 12 hours for a 7GB file copy? nahh...)

How to update Xamarin on Visual Studio 2015

For those using VS 2015, community edition or higher, I am sure that the useless notification "Xamarin for Visual Studio Update Available" is irritating. Clicking on it does nothing. Updating the nuget packages doesn't solve the problem either. The MS forums suggested that you go to the Control Panel, Settings, Uninstall Program and "Change" the product setup.

No. They don't work. I am not sure who are these well meaning people who gave these suggestions but that's not how Xamarin was setup. Maybe they will fix it later and deliver Xamarin updates like updates for C++, SDKs, etc. But not now (end Sept 2016).

So what can you do?

Start your VS, go to Tools -> Options.
There is a whole list of configurations on the left hand side of the Options dialog box.
Go to the bottom, the 2nd last entry should be Xamarin. Expand it and choose "Other".
On the right hand side, click on "Check now" and another dialog box will open.
Click on the download button at the bottom and wait for the download to complete.

Once download is done, try to close VS before you proceed with the upgrade.

That's it.

Have fun!

npm install mariasql failed (Windows 7, 64bit)

Environment: Windows 7, 64bit
NodeJS version: 0.10.30

npm install mariasql will not work due to "node-gyp rebuild" failed.

To fix it:

1. I installed Python 2.7.x (at time of this writing - 4th October 2014), 32bit edition.
2. Create environment variable PYTHON, with the value of "\python.exe"  
3. Yes, you must include python.exe in your Environment Variable setting or it will NOT work.
4. Start a new CMD shell and run "npm install mariasql" again.

It will take some time but it will succeed.

Hope this helps.