Windows 10 Fall Update Uninstalls Desktop Software Without Informing Users (ghacks.net)

ourlovecanlastforeve sends this report from Martin Brinkmann of gHacks: Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system may uninstall programs — desktop programs that is — from the computer after installation of the big Fall update that the company released earlier this month. I noticed the issue on one PC that I upgraded to Windows 10 Version 1511 but not on other machines. The affected PC had Speccy, a hardware information program, installed and Windows 10 notified me after the upgrade that the software had been removed from the system because of incompatibilities. There was no indication beforehand that something like this would happen, and what made this rather puzzling was the fact that a newly downloaded copy of Speccy would install and run fine on the upgraded system. An IT Director I know had this happen with ESET antivirus as well, on multiple computers. He says fixes have been rolled out for both TH2 and the antivirus software to prevent this from happening. Other reports mention CPU-Z, AMD's Catalyst Control Center, and CPUID as software that's being automatically uninstalled.

Comments

Windows 7

[Pentium100]

So, I guess Windows 7 will be the last Windows OS that I use. Hopefully by the time new games stop supporting it, Linux will have the support of new games.

Re:Windows 7

[Anonymous Coward]

So, I guess Windows 7 will be the last Windows OS that I use. Hopefully by the time new games stop supporting it, Linux will have the support of new games.

Same has been said by many a people about Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1.

Truth is at the end of the day when MS have a small or any screwup the open-source crowd are so divided among themselves that they can never seize the opportunity.

Re:Windows 7

[cfalcon]

Vista had bloaty problems, but it was just a good reason to hold onto XP for a bit longer. Seven is a very good OS- apparently the last one. Eight and Eight-one have some mild spyware problems, but nothing intractable- mostly it's just their anti-user UI arrogance that got them a bad reception. Up until right near the end when Microsoft added all the spyware and really baked it in hard, everyone was expecting to go to Windows 10.

But Windows 10 is the worst thing ever, so nope.

release notes should have informed users

[Ilgaz]

Oh wait, there are no release notes except marketing talk. Believe or not, they don't publish release notes anymore. When a company CEO talks about what a "serious" company they are, show them this story.

Re:Intended?

[hcs_$reboot]

To be fair, and I'll play the devil advocate for once, not all Windows users are slashdotters. Yes, you, /. reader, belong to the cream of the cream of the IT knowledgeable people on Earth. For the remaining 99%, Windows is just a tool to run some games, play movies, open IE and watch porn, and to occasionally feed some accounting basic Excel spreadsheets. So MS takes over, sometimes, and decides for you what's good, what's bad. And acts accordingly. And maybe this is better for most users. Of course, however how deep you'd have to dig it, there must be an option - intended for the advanced user - to switch off any of those intrusive features.

Re:Intended?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a lot of users who might be best of with the company knowing best... but ceding control of one's PC is not a good thing.

Folks, we are starting to lose the war on the desktop. Consoles are already lost, phones and tablets are becoming less modifiable, and with the push for "security" on IoT devices, this usually means security against the owner, not an intruder.

If we lose the desktop, we are fucked, pure and simple. Look how recently PC makers and MS have been pushing boundaries:

1: The Superfish type of items. In this day and age of anything and everything being used as a potential means of intel gathering, any type of "functionality" along these lines should be treated as malicious criminal activity, or at best, gross negligence. This should never have passed any QA department.

2: W10 removing software. I understand the purpose of the Windows MSRT... but there is a boundary between obvious malware and Speccy.

3: Telemetry data. Before this year, telemetry was not even used much in this context. In the past, people would be writing their senators about such privacy invasions (think the "scandal" ages ago, where Prodigy set aside temp files without clearing them, and people found their deleted stuff in them.) Unless something is done now, this trespass will continue to the point where a Windows machine is basically an endpoint belonging to advertisers, intel gatherers, and potentially malware authors.

Want to know how to get the desktop back? It is going to be pretty tough at this rate, but we can still run older operating systems, or operating systems which don't really care about telemetry data. Virtualization also helps.

The last Windows version ever.

[Thanatiel]

The only reason I (still) use W10 is games (more than 300, in Steam only). I have every second of using it.
As soon as there are enough high budgets games running on Linux, I'll finally get rid of it for a systemd-free linux (Manjaro-openrc comes to mind).
I've good hopes that SteamOS will lead us outside of the Windows era.
Microsoft was right : Windows 10 is the last Windows version ... ever.