### It’s a Paperweight Now: Did a Microsoft Update Kill My Snapdragon Dev Kit?

There’s a sad, dark grey box sitting on my desk today. It’s the Windows Dev Kit 2023, affectionately known to many as Project Volterra. Or, at least, it *was*. Now, it’s just an expensive, fan-less paperweight. And I have a strong suspicion that its killer was an automatic update pushed by Microsoft.

For months, this little Arm-powered machine has been a reliable, if not blazing-fast, companion for my work on native Arm64 Windows applications. It was a statement from Microsoft: “We are serious about Windows on Arm. Here is the hardware to build the future.” I bought in. I was excited. The machine was quiet, efficient, and did exactly what it promised. It let me compile and test my code on the native architecture, a crucial step for performance and stability.

Everything was fine until last night.

I noticed a pending update in Windows Update. It looked like a standard cumulative update, maybe with some firmware bundled in—nothing out of the ordinary. As I’ve done a hundred times before, I clicked “Restart now” and walked away to grab a coffee.

I came back to a black screen.

Not a “Windows is booting” black screen. Just… nothing. The tiny white power LED on the front is lit, mocking me with its semblance of life, but there is no signal to the monitor. No flicker of activity. Nothing.

I’ve tried everything. Power cycling, of course. Using a different monitor and a different cable. Holding the power button for 30 seconds. Unplugging it for an hour and trying again. It’s completely unresponsive. There’s no BIOS or UEFI I can easily access like on a traditional x86 machine. There’s no “safe mode” prompt. The device is, for all intents and purposes, a brick.

What makes me point the finger at Microsoft? The timing is too perfect. The device was humming along flawlessly until the very moment it attempted to install a mandatory update from its own creator. A quick search across Reddit and developer forums shows I’m not entirely alone. I’ve found scattered posts from other developers over the last year describing similar sudden-death scenarios with their Snapdragon Dev Kits, often immediately following a system or firmware update. The common thread is the helplessness—a device that works one minute and is permanently inert the next, with no official recovery tool or bootable image provided for users to fix it themselves.

This is the deep frustration of being an early adopter on a platform Microsoft is trying so hard to legitimize. We invest in the recommended hardware to support the ecosystem, but that hardware feels fragile, almost disposable. If the very company pushing the platform can inadvertently brick its own developer-focused hardware with a routine update, what does that say about the stability and maturity of Windows on Arm?

For now, my journey into native Arm64 development is on an expensive, indefinite pause. I’m left with a dead box, a cautionary tale, and a hope that Microsoft will eventually provide a recovery solution for these devices. Until then, if you have a Snapdragon Dev Kit, maybe think twice before you click “Restart now.” You might just be telling your machine goodbye.