I had an ugly experience today. After two days of trying to find a way to delete and reinstall a malfunctioning Outlook on my 950XL, I figured I would just do a hard reset. That approach has worked previously to bring badly performing apps back into compliance. I had already used the WDRT three days ago to update the firmware, so I just pushed the "reset" button in the phone's settings panel.
Halfway through, abort -- the phone reported that it couldn't reset. That's when I connected it to the WDRT again. The phone was recognized as a 950XL and the downloads began. Suddenly there was a failure notification and a "Try again" message. So I started WDRT again and reconnected, but this time it didn't know what type of phone it was trying to recover. I clicked the "not recognized" button and then the Lumia option on the next screen. A download progress bar got to about halfway across the screen before I got the "Failure" message again. Retried and got a third of the way across. Retried and got the failure before any of the download progress bar was filled in. At this point the screen displayed something I had never seen before -- a brick red background with two broken arrows at the top of the screen forming a square with open corners. Powering the phone down would black the screen after about 10 seconds, and then a split second later the phone had a start buzz, recreating the brick screen. The only way to turn it off completely was to open it and pull the battery.
So off to the Microsoft Store I went, where the tech tried the WDRT solution again and saw the red screen. Then he tried to restart the phone for another go and -- nothing. Not just a stuck phone with a brick-colored screen but a totally nonresponsive powerless brick with no display and no vibration cues at all. At that point he said, "We'll give you a new one."
So I came home with a new 950XL and spent the next four hours getting it configured, updated and reloaded with all my apps and photos. After seeing that the previously problematic Outlook was working properly, I enrolled the new phone in the Insider program and upgraded to 14393.5. In the course of this long process I got the OTA firmware update that is now rolling out in North America and other lands, which was nice. No need to connect to WDRT to get a fully up-to-date working phone. The phone came to me with OS 10586.107 on it and a build date of February. It updated first to 10586.494, and then later I took it up to the current Fast Ring release.
At the end of the day I am no worse off than I was a couple of days ago, ignoring the frustration and lost time. Microsoft was fine to work with and decided quickly to replace a clearly troubled phone rather than to take it in and try to do something serious with it in the back room.
I'm sorry I didn't use another phone to catch an image of the red screen. I kept thinking the phone was going to come back from the dead right up to the instant when it just flat out died on the Microsoft counter.
Long story, but I had never seen a red screen before and wanted to mention it as a sign of serious trouble if any others come across it.
Halfway through, abort -- the phone reported that it couldn't reset. That's when I connected it to the WDRT again. The phone was recognized as a 950XL and the downloads began. Suddenly there was a failure notification and a "Try again" message. So I started WDRT again and reconnected, but this time it didn't know what type of phone it was trying to recover. I clicked the "not recognized" button and then the Lumia option on the next screen. A download progress bar got to about halfway across the screen before I got the "Failure" message again. Retried and got a third of the way across. Retried and got the failure before any of the download progress bar was filled in. At this point the screen displayed something I had never seen before -- a brick red background with two broken arrows at the top of the screen forming a square with open corners. Powering the phone down would black the screen after about 10 seconds, and then a split second later the phone had a start buzz, recreating the brick screen. The only way to turn it off completely was to open it and pull the battery.
So off to the Microsoft Store I went, where the tech tried the WDRT solution again and saw the red screen. Then he tried to restart the phone for another go and -- nothing. Not just a stuck phone with a brick-colored screen but a totally nonresponsive powerless brick with no display and no vibration cues at all. At that point he said, "We'll give you a new one."
So I came home with a new 950XL and spent the next four hours getting it configured, updated and reloaded with all my apps and photos. After seeing that the previously problematic Outlook was working properly, I enrolled the new phone in the Insider program and upgraded to 14393.5. In the course of this long process I got the OTA firmware update that is now rolling out in North America and other lands, which was nice. No need to connect to WDRT to get a fully up-to-date working phone. The phone came to me with OS 10586.107 on it and a build date of February. It updated first to 10586.494, and then later I took it up to the current Fast Ring release.
At the end of the day I am no worse off than I was a couple of days ago, ignoring the frustration and lost time. Microsoft was fine to work with and decided quickly to replace a clearly troubled phone rather than to take it in and try to do something serious with it in the back room.
I'm sorry I didn't use another phone to catch an image of the red screen. I kept thinking the phone was going to come back from the dead right up to the instant when it just flat out died on the Microsoft counter.
Long story, but I had never seen a red screen before and wanted to mention it as a sign of serious trouble if any others come across it.
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