Whoever is responsible for the “Something happened” error message that’s been bothering Windows 10 upgraders ever since Windows 10 became publicly available needs a stern talking-to. It’s the least helpful error message in the history of computers, and the last thing anyone who’s just trying to install Windows 10 needs to deal with.

When I upgraded from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 yesterday, here at Microsoft HQ, I too fell victim to that stupid message. Thank the internet for reddit, which is where I found the solution: change your regional and language settings to United States and English (US) respectively and restart the upgrade.

Here’s how to do it:

• Open the Control Panel, then go to Language and region and set your region to United States.
• Then go to the Administrative tab (found on the same Language and region window) and change the language to English (United States).
• Once you’ve done this, restart the upgrade process and the Something happened error shouldn’t come up.

Just FYI, I was upgrading from Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit to Windows 10 Pro 64-bit and I used the official installer, found here, so if your circumstances are different you may not have the same success I did. But it’s somewhere to start, so give it a go.

Should that fail, you may need to create installation media for the installation, and not do it directly via the upgrade installer. Find out how to do that here, under the “Single download, multiple upgrades” section.

Hope that helps!