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Microsoft Denies Rogue Windows 10 Upgrades, Says Users Remain Fully In Control (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: Despite significant user outcry that Microsoft Windows 10 upgrade mechanism has gone rogue, installing on customers' Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 machines when their backs were turned or they were otherwise away from the computer, Microsoft is pleading innocent. News broke of the automatic Windows 10 upgrades over the weekend, and in nearly every case, it was claimed Windows 10 installed without user intervention. Microsoft issued the following statement regarding the alleged unplanned upgrades: "We shared in late October on the Windows Blog, we are committed to making it easy for our Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 customers to upgrade to Windows 10. As stated in that post, we have updated the upgrade experience to make it easier for customers to schedule a time for their upgrade to take place. Customers continue to be fully in control of their devices, and can choose to not install the Windows 10 upgrade or remove the upgrade from Windows Update (WU) by changing the WU settings." However, users are still reporting the Windows 10 has allegedly forcefully taken over their machines. Hundreds and maybe thousands of users and IT admins are still chiming in on various threads around the web that they've "been had" by Microsoft.
Happened on my wife's Windows 7 system over the weekend.
Which is why I shut off updates completely
The popup before the forced install said "do you want to install Windows 10 now, or download it for installation later". Either of those option is consent to install Windows 10. You probably selected "download for later installation" thinking you'd have a chance to refuse the installation. What you should have done is click the close-box top right.
It was a trick.
Oh yeah, its an experience all right. Possibly not quite the one they had in mind though.
As long as they install GWX Control Panel. Otherwise, they get whatever turd sandwich Microsoft feels like shoving down their throats.
Or users could go really nuts and install Linux or a BSD.
Just remember what Microsoft can do with your machine if you allow the Microsoft Anti-Malware Scanner Update to install: anything it likes. If you allowed the earlier Windows 10 nag update to install, you consented to the upgrade in their view, even if it was automatically installed as a recommended update.
More likely: Clueless users who forgot they clicked ok, or Microsoft conspiracy?
Hmmmm, with all this rage going on with Apple and the FBI, could this conversation have already happened
with MS? The government tells MS, we want our backdoors into your OS. MS replies with, well our new
OS was especailly made with you in mind, as we know how much you like going in the backdoor. Now the
government is a little angry with MS, as not enough people have taken the new upgrade, so MS is pushing hard
to make people take the upgrade, wither they like it, or not.
FTFA:
Customers continue to be fully in control of their devices, and can choose to not install the Windows 10 upgrade or remove the upgrade from Windows Update (WU) by changing the WU settings.
So, this sounds like if you have automatic update turned on, you'd get upgraded to Windows 10?
If I'm right, then what one needs to do is turn off automatic updates?
It's been a few years since I had a Windows system, so keep that in mind.
Knowing how even somewhat savvy computer users will just click away anything they see, I have to agree with Microsoft on this. I have yet to see it install by itself on any of my many windows 7 and 8 machines. However, knowing that, Microsoft should NOT be installing it through Windows Update. The tray icon is good enough.
We have some old machines which are clearly unable to run Windows 10. They barely run Windows 7. Yet, they keep getting notifications to upgrade to Windows 10, and list it on available updates. It is never going to run on a Pentium M or D machine. Microsoft, include a hardware check before you try to push it!
they are raping people computers
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Just use your Windows in a 32GB partition. There won't be any room for a huge Windows 10 push, or much of anything else. I typically have about 2GB free. The rest of the drive sits unpartitioned as far s Windows is concerned, which is great -- no space for the typically associated bloat and malware to leap around in.
captcha: rascal
Automatic updates on her Windows 7 computer were off but Windows 10 self-installed over a weekend.
I am just a dumb hipster overpaying for my hardware because of the logo...
AND LAUGHING MY ASS OFF.
You stay with Microsoft, you deserve what you get.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
From what I understand if you are running 7 ultimate or any of the "corporate licensed" versions, or on a domain, or running your own wsus server it's not going to happen to you.
Has this happened to real people at Slashdot, or is this disinformation propagated by ACs? Cause from here, it looks like disinformation...
But hey, as this is proprietary software, it could be an ugly and illegal piece of A/B testing. It could. Still, no proof seen here. My Windows 7 boxes are doing fine (and my Windows 10 too, BTW).
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
Happened to my daughter's computer. Unfortunately, her internet access was obtained over an LTE device (Rogers "Rocket Stick") - the Windows 10 downloads resulted in a $100 Cdn bill.
Hmm... This could be: - Dumb users clicking "Yes, upgrade my computer" or - A Microsoft conspiracy forcing millions of computers (most being used by businesses) to install a completely new OS on their computers without their consent. I don't believe in Bigfoot or the Illuminati or Obama being a secret Muslim, so I'm going to go with #1.
Microsoft apologized months ago for doing exactly what you're denying is occurring now: https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
Yesterday I had a customer call because one of his PCs has updated to Windows 10 without asking. According to the user, she had come back to her PC to see the update already installing. Of course I cannot know if that is the complete story, users are notoriously unreliable, but a couple of things come to mind.
First, the customer called mainly because some programs stopped working. If things stop working it's not an "upgrade", its a whole new OS, and you have to market it that way, and wait for people to install it proactively. Anything else is irresponsible.
Second, reports like this one are suddenly multiplying. There is no real difference in my mind between starting the "upgrade" on Windows' own volition or offering the "upgrade" to the user so many times and in so different ways as to make it practically sure that he or she will accept it by mistake.
Microsoft is clearly confident in that its ecosystem is so solid in the desktop that nothing they do will change that. They are probably right, most of my customers are so heavily invested in the MS environment that nothing at all will make them change. One tried to switch away from Office to LibreOffice and, after a couple of years, had to backtrack licking its wounds.
So you have a monopoly, but also a saturated market. You miss out on the Web revolution because you don't like centralized services, you like distributed better, that's your business. Then you miss out on the mobile revolution because the interface is so different from the one you have, and in your religion there is only one commandment, and it is :"There is only one Windows, and all pledge loyalty to It". So God forbids that you make something imaginative, like another system that works well with Windows. Afterwards you foul your cash cow by changing the interface that was working (desktop Windows) to be usable in the touchscreen world, apparently ignoring that people are well capable of learning and using two different interfaces with ease.
So you prod your customers in the direction you want, even if you are not very sure of it being a good direction. It may be a winning strategy, who knows, not I, I have never earned the fat bonuses these marketing geniuses make. But in my book, prodding customers isn't a winning strategy.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
I dont know what the " GWX Configuration tool" is but I use the updated "GWX Control Panel" tool and I opt to disable all the win10 upgrades AND delete the GWX program right out of my system.
A couple dozen of my users whom I havent disable the win10 update on got hit with random unauthorized win10 upgrades. But I have tracked that to a windows setting to install updates when shutting down the PC.
They shut down Windows 7 they start up with Windows 10
This doesn't look good for Microsoft. It should be easy to confirm, as all installations should behave in the same way at the very least if they are running the same edition of Windows7/8/8.1
The fact that they can't give a simple Yes or No answer and a few screenshots about how this works makes it look like there is some sort of dodgy affair going on, like what was described earlier that the way to cancel is to use a tiny Close button instead of a proper Cancel button.
My PC hasn't tried to install anything by itself, possibly because it knows that when I tried to do it (on day 1 after release!) it failed on hardware/BIOS stuff.
Now the right way to get Win 10 on this PC is probably to wipe out the current installation, but I certainly don't plan on being the one idiot who pays for a licence when others are fighting their machines to not get the upgrade.
Call from mother-in-law (78yo with really bad eyesight). She just back home from a week trip and when she logged into her notebook with Win7, it was upgraded to Win10.
All of her special settings, very large font, extra large Icons ... gone, back to standard fonts with a new Win10 interface she doesn't understand etc.. computer was useless to her at that point.
Upgrade took place the night before when she was not even in the house. I had to go over and revert it back to Win7, put GWX Control panel on it to prevent any further changes.
Machine is old, she uses it for email and web, that is it. Not powerful enough to run Win10.
In my case the solution was completely disable the Windows Update service (denying the service from booting, not just change a setting on the control panel). No more Windows updates for me, but these days I no longer trust the service to leave it on.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Then you're an idiot. Microsoft's history has shown they they are willing to do whatever it takes to dominate the PC market, including breaking the law.
That was my experience as well. EXCEPT I had successfully rescheduled it several times AND THEN one night, it started upgrading without warning me. IT threw me off without a restart notice, there was no countdown that you mentioned. I was very disappointed to lose what I had been writing in a web app hosted by my Uni caused by the sudden and unexpected restart.
Do you have kids???
I have 3 windows 7 PCs, none of which automatically upgraded. On to of that, the one I tried to intentionally upgrade, failed miserably. I ended up installing kodibuntu on that...much faster!
[Customers] can choose to not install the Windows 10 upgrade or remove the upgrade from Windows Update (WU) by changing the WU settings.
Hear that? It's not automatic IF YOU OPT OUT by changing the WU settings.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Maybe it's because, as others have suggested, I didn't track down the setting that explicitly states "do not install windows 10", but sure enough, this happened on my Windows 7 machine. I put it to sleep one night and when I woke it up the next morning I was greeted by the "Welcome to Windows 10" screen and had to click through the configuration options to finish setting up Windows 10.
Best of all, it killed my WiFI adapter, which is another thing that I am seeing many complaints about online. I had a D-LINK USB wireless adapter on my desktop, and it stopped working after the upgrade. The adapter isn't supported anymore and there were no compatible driver updates for it. SO I had to buy a new one that said it was Win10 compatible.
You are knowingly saying statements that are not true.
I found Windows 10 was checked automatically as an optional update in Windows 8.1 for this month's updates. I had to click on "not accept" the license agreement twice before I found the issue the third time around.
What do you mean they are denying it ? they did not deny that they changed it to a recommended update, if you have automatic windows update enabled (enabled by default when you install the os) it WILL install windows 10
i just opened windows update in windows 8.1 to check and it automatically selected the windows 10 upgrade (in the optional tab) as the most critical update instead of the 50+ critical updates in the priority tab
Forced adware install to get an IE security update is user choice ?How please. It blackmail,its evil its Microsoft SSDD.
Jack of all trades,master of none
I've got two good points to make:
First:
Sounds cold, but if there's anything I've learned from two decades of supporting end users, it's that end users are incapable of administering windows machines. They don't know shit and they should probably all be on chromebooks, ipads, or locked down VDI sessions. It's probably good on the whole to force home users to 10 lest we have the same problem we did last time around with XP being the defacto OS for 10 years.
This is consumer computing in 2016. Computing is a service. Deal with it. Expect it to get worse. If you want control use Linux.
Second:
Stalman was right.
I ran Windows Update last night, and the 'Upgrade to Win 10' (an optional update) was auto-selected.
The Windows Update page at this point had only one option to click. Begin installation of Windows 10.
Just like this: http://postimg.org/image/qkvw8...
You had to go into "show all available update options" which is in small blue text. Deselect the optional update, so that you can select the "important" ones.
Today, I thought, I'll open Windows Update to see what the small blue text was, to be more accurate...and guess what... yeah the Windows 10 "optional" update is reselected, and if you bother looking at the image above, again the only option to proceed unless you "show all available update options"
So Microsoft can claim whatever the fuck they want. It's bullshit.
Ah, finally a Slashdot car analogy.
I feel much better now.
The jerks at M$oft are drunk with corporate cool-aid and follow other objectives abusing their customers.
Happens a lot, just look at any larger corporation, where the only goal it to increase bottom-line - take them to the cleaner!
Three of my 7 machines greeted me with Windows 10 Tuesday morning. I was furious, and there is no downgrade path. I had to restore from HDD image, which thankfully was recent.
I really have to say that the Slashdot users that made this community so great have either left, or have all gotten lobotomies. This stupid fake story is just that: a stupid fake story. If even a percentage of Windows 7 machines across the planet were automatically wiping themselves, there'd be a bit of news about it other than some anonymous Internet comments. Businesses and government agencies everywhere would be dead in their tracks. This is really a load of shit, and I'm disappointed that so few intelligent Slashdot users are left or care enough to moderate any more.
I don't respond to AC's.
Undoing Accidental Mod... Why is there no way to do this without posting :(
It is not as if Microsoft does not employ people who are competent at designing and testing proper user interfaces: People who know and expect how users will interface with Windows Update.
They expect people to install it by mistake.
The forced update is nothing else but intentional douchebaggery.
To blame the users is probably what they had planned to do all along.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
I am only a tiny little bit perplexed - it is, after all, a bald-faced lie, but this new, more malevolent Microsoft, is fully capable of such unethical behavior.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I never consented to downloading or installing windows 10. My computer does have automatic updates turned on, but I never specifically agreed to upgrade. I closed the lid on my laptop, and next time I opened it I was greeted by the dreaded windows 10 screen.
I have done that, but the update didn't carry over the applications from Windows7 for some reason, it presented a mostly blank install. The only two application it did carry over where some old copies of Word and Excel, both of which failed to run in Windows10. The rollback to Windows7 however seems to have worked. Given how aggressively Microsoft is pushing Windows10 update I would have expected a better tested upgrade routine.
Actually a car analogy response to a car analogy.
But MS has a lock in strategy, massive PR spend and a marketing budget to aid to "convince" the executives that Windows is best and the rest are unreliable at best.
If you're so serious about the user being in control, put your money where you mouth is and release an uninstall tool to stop the "Get Windows 10" icon in the System Tray (rather than us having to use a third-party software) and stop adding Windows 10 as a "recommended update" (regardless of whether it runs on it's own or not) so it quits downloading gigabytes of data before the customer consents to the upgrade.
Had to roll back a client's yesterday. Shut it down monday win 7 came back Tuesday to 10 and mass confusion. Of course rollback does not remove edge.
Had 10's non-disablable updates pooch a quickbooks server on payday last week. Thanks MS your stupidity is making me a lot of money.
Do you not find it remarkable that each and every one of these... "incompetent" mistakes are always in their favor?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Windows 10 is a messy pile of dung. It just doesn't smell quite as bad as 8. The interface is a disaster because randomly placed tiles is such a great way to organize things. 10 is the thing that doesn't work.
I think what we have here are users are not reading the update dialog carefully and just clicking "go". I'll capitulate that knowing exactly what is about to happen during a Windows update is often foggy at best. IMO for a major OS update is user should be told very clearly (flashing neon lights kinda clearly) that the OS is about to be replaced with a newer version and then confirm they want to do that. Anything other is questionable and will lead to this finger pointing. MS might want to stop auto checking the install Windows 10 checkbox. That's kinda dirty pool.
I dont know what the " GWX Configuration tool" is but I use the updated "GWX Control Panel"
Yes, that.
I ran it once in the beginning, once a while back, and once over the weekend.
The problem is MS keeps changing the game. I'd rather not install GWX Control Panel in watchdog mode, especially since whenever MS changes the game there's some delay before GWX Control Panel can react. Killing Windows Update entirely and blocking everything MS at my router seems like a better idea at this point.
These people that say they never "authorized" the upgrade, are the same people that tell me I only hit the print button once, and it prints the same thing over and over again (even though the print log says they printed at: 14:14:18, 14:14:19, 14:14:20 etc)
You don't know what you're talking about. I have personally seen Windows 10 installed where a computer was left unattended. Nobody manually agreed to anything, and the EULA prompt was displayed AFTER Windows 10 was installed.
One had better remain "fully" in control at all times, because one slip of the finger is borderline irreversible for a great many people (here "borderline" is defined to mean "would require a substantial wallet flex"). Mounting mountains of psychology research show that humans are only "fully" in control of anything when their declared intention at the convenience of their best cognizance can be locked into place once and for all, until countermanded with equal and opposite intentional force.
Control as per our paleolithic instincts:
[*] don't ever ask me again, if you value your nut sack
What a surprising thing for HID professionals to fail to notice: human to human intentional declarations are expressed in eleven exponential shades of scatological glower.
Move over b2b / b2c, here comes DeepMind with some long-overdue h2c (human to computer) gesture recognition.
Besides, I can't think of one good reason to stay on 7 when 10 is free. I'm sure plenty of people will proffer suggestions, but I'm betting each is easily dismissed nonsense. Go ahead and try to prove me wrong.
The update for Windows 10 was moved from optional to recommend which means that if the user lets windows 7 or 8 auto update, then it will auto update into Windows 10. It starts with KB3035583 to force the GWX program on the users PC. After that is installed if you go into windows update all other updates are unchecked and only the Upgrade to Windows 10 update is checked which says it's like 2.2GB's. Unchecking it and hiding it does nothing as it re-appears if you close the window and go back into it. As soon as you hit "update", or let it auto update, BAM! Windows 10.
The only thing you can do is to un-install KB3035583. Disable auto update, check for updates. Then uncheck and hide KB3035583. You now have to leave Windows Update on the option to "Check but not install updates" and manually go through the updates yourself.
Don't trust MS.
I'm rather skeptical about this really happening. I have 1 Windows 7 machine here at home, it hasn't ever tried to install Windows 10.
Additionally, I refurbish laptops with Windows 7 Home Premium every day, and I've more than once left them running over night to do updates to themselves, not a single one has attempted to install Windows 10 on it's own.
So I dunno, I'm not saying people are lying, but there's got to be some kind of user interaction that's being done, that we're not being told about.
They say "we are committed to making it easy for our Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 customers to upgrade to Windows 10"
If they had their customers in mind, they should be committed to making it easy to choose either option as opposed to easy to choose one.
Especially when the one choice is good for Microsoft, but not necessarily one size fits all for the customer.
Just fix fucking sleep on my machine, it worked before, why doesn't it work in Windows 10?
ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe.
HD6950.
DS4Windows.
Geforce Experience for Nvidia Shield controller.
Is bullshit. He clearly (even after clicking the little blue text that a normal end user never would) deselected the option to put this virus on his computer.
The next time he opened windows update, the virus was re-selected to install.
It's bullshit, plain and simple.
Well, they did make it a recommended update, so automatic installations were going to happen. But it's not like it was a secret. Admins especially should have known. I did. Read it right here.
Just make sure your C: drive is close to full, and it will never be able to force this down on you.
Well known is most Slashdot's readership on Microsoft so the majority of these threads are nonsense and garbage.
> You must have Automatic Updates enabled, then also have "Treat Recommended Updates as Important" however both of these are enabled by default, so there ya go.
> Then you had to completely dismiss the Windows 10 upgrade options. Both available selection options to continue would eventually install win10.
> Finally it seems that domain connected machines are not being forced by default but I can't find information specifically about it. All of my workstations are still Windows 8.1 and some have the GWX.exe running on them. So the no-force on domain controlled networks seems to be true but I don't know how the deadline works.
Linux users/fans/shills, making up bullshit to make a company that already does shitty things worse just makes you all look like a bunch of idiotic children.
Microsoft has been planing this for a LONG time. They've gone full double agent.
Have not seen any Win10 nagware on my domain PCs (yet).
I currently am running Win10 at home, but that was a complete fresh install, not an upgrade. Before I was running Win7 Home, but I never did see the Win10 nagware, even without being careful about updates. I was running Classic Shell, so that might have had something to do with it. I don't know. I *do* know my son's PC is showing the nagware. No auto-updated PCs in my experience yet. YMMV
THE SOFTWARE, IT NO WORKY!!!
they surely got the money to grease some palms. it would distract everyone who's been complaining about their decreasing software-quality in a "see: windows is still a million times worse"-way :-)
finally
At this point I've resigned to add MS to my kill file and move on. If they have this much contempt and disregard for their customers now... Just imagine what they are going to be like when they really start to lose market share. Better abandon ship now while the abandoning is good.
Microsoft is not stupid. They know all about Interface design and human factors. What they are doing is like an infomercial or PR department spewing misleading language while technically may be true is intentionally knowingly designed to leverage ignorance or trick people who are not lawyers into making implicit assumptions. Whether machines are upgrading themselves or not is irrelevant. What is relevant is the fact people are being fucked over by a deliberate and conscious action on the part of Microsoft.
How can anyone expect integrity from a corporation who intentionally installs and enables backdoors access by default allowing Microsoft to read any file or setting they feel like from your computer without your knowledge or consent?
https://technet.microsoft.com/...
Do yourselves a favor, cut your losses and bail.
"we have updated the upgrade experience to make it easier for customers to schedule a time for their upgrade to take place"
:]
But we don't give them the option to opt out of the upgrade experience
I've come to the conclusion that Windows 10 and MS's abhorrent behavior makes Windows 10 a computer-equivalent of a sexually transmitted disease.. Call it say, a CTD. Of course in the case of the STD, a nice little rubber balloon does a fair job of protecting the "family-jewels" from said STD. In the case of a CTD, its quite a bit more complicated, but simply disabling WU does a pretty fine job...Of course, Windows being what it is, I certainly wouldn't advise disabling WU unless you take certain other precautions prior to using the system on the wild-n-wooly internet...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
I have more computers in my basement than I care to admit and I have upgraded two of them from the Windows XP that came with them to Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 using licenses from the university. I have yet to see any nagging to upgrade to Windows 10.
I'd like to keep those computers with the OS they have now for software testing and because of compatibility issues with older software I use. "Downgrading" to XP might actually be an improvement since both machines have Wi-Fi devices on board which drivers exist only for Windows XP. If I reinstall XP on those machines then I gain Wi-Fi, won't get nagged for an operating system that likely would not run on them anyway, and I can keep running the old software.
What I'd lose with reverting to XP is the ability to test in Windows 7 and 8.1 but if this fiasco works out like Microsoft seems to intend then there is no point to testing on those operating systems anyway.
Yes, Windows 7 is old and XP is ancient but for what I do they work just fine. I do networking stuff and web development. All I need those computers to do is run things like terminal emulators, ping, telnet, tftp, and some text editing. I use Windows instead of Linux because the drivers are there, they work well with the OS, and when it comes down to it I really don't think too much about what OS is there so long as it stays out of my way. Besides, with Windows XP I can run some of my old games and not have to tweak an emulator for it to work.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
They did it to my wife's PC 3 times.
I had to go to fairly great lengths to stop it from recurring.
Installed and deployed GWX Control Panel to stop it.
Tell me: Why would GWX Control Panel even exist if this problem did not happen?
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
I have a vm running server 2008r2. It is a clean vm that was created but never used years ago with only 1 update ever installed on it from the end of 2012. That update is the only one listed. It is set to NEVER DOWNLOAD UPDATES. When I ran GWX control panel on it, it showed about 500mb of data in the win10 folder and win 10 upgrades was listed as possible.
How is it, a vm created years ago and never used with windows updates turned off and part of a wsus system that has all updates refused, could have win10 software folder and data?
As a computer tech I have come across this half a dozen times so far this year. I believe this is a horseshit statement.
GroMM
Do any of the group claiming that M$ is *pushing* W10 updates on people care to explain why only a very small percentage of users have reported this specific behaviour?
Why has it not happened to me or all the others?
Do you people possibly have cats? Children? Because they love to push keys and click the mouse when no one is looking.
William of Ockham says hello, 'STEM' students.........
In that case, I want win98 's floating toolbars back, pronto. And the degree of folder customization back too. In conducting my research for this, (fair use?) I installed a few flavors of Dosbox downloaded an ISO file containing win9x installations, used some instructions from VOGON as a guide, and swapped the virtual partitions between Dosbox flavors every time I hit a dead end and I had a system that I could use to demo the things I want Microsoft to do and took screenshots with Windows Feedback. If I worked a bit harder with it I could come up with a better demo, but I just can't right now. If you are willing to put in some effort to get Win98 working with Dosbox, you too can try out Win98's ability to do floating toolbars by right clicking on the taskbar, select something about adding a toolbar, choose a directory, and drag the resulting toolbar into anywhere on the screen. You can write batch files to move stuff in and out of these toolbars, allowing them to hold things that are context sensitive. For customizing folders, right-click on any folder and choose customize folder. First a wizard will open, and you can get to a point where a page containing html will appear and you edit this to control how the folder is displayed. I also needed a Dos boot disk image which is easier to search for, and it seems when I followed advice at VOGON to format the partition and transfer the DOS system over, apparently some vestges remained and the old COMMAND.COM stuck around so I had to download the right one from the same place I got the DOS boot image.
Microsoft is lying. Their rouge upgrade bullshit took out a Point of Sale system (POS) at a local shop last Monday. The shop's (contracted) IT guy eventually got it back to Win 7, but they had to go to paper records for hours, and now the books for Monday are all screwed up.
MS may be looking at a class action suit if this shit keeps up.
Go get em!
Burn baby burn!
Fuck you Microsoft. Just auto upgrade my computer so I can join the class action lawsuit already
I use every OS daily and have watched MIcrosoft's out-of-touch-with-reality decline over the last 10 yrs with disbelief. When lately I first saw the FULL-SCREEN WIN 10 NAG SCREENS on my win 7 desktop at my university I just sat there in disbelief. I took a picture of the screen with my phone as it is one of the most embarrassing moments in the history of computing IMO. Desperation like this is shameful and I believe hurts the MS brand more than helps. Well at least it's been a resounding success with what 10% uptake?
High-tech companies like Microsoft depend on employees being able to say proudly "I work at Microsoft". The moment that saying that leads to people screaming at them over the update problem the Microsofties start hiding who they work for and the best ones, the ones with choices, start looking for an employer they can admit to working for. Even better at conventions refuse to let them into conversations- shun them. And don't accept "But that's not my division" as an excuse.
Happened to both of my parents machines overnight. Wanted alternative, with no apple tax. Looks like a general district of Linux is appealing to them
If there is ever a person who knows what he's doing around computers, that person would be Jerry Pournelle, former columnist for BYTE magazine (and several others over the last 3 decades) and current master science fiction author.
https://www.jerrypournelle.com...
Jerry Pournelle's Windows 7 computer "updated" itself to Windows 10 overnight without his permission a few days ago.
I continue to recommend the GWX Control Panel to prevent your Windows 7/8/8.1 system from upgrading before you're ready.
https://askleo.com/block-windo...
Seriously folks, Users *do* remain in complete control! I can prove it.
When I installed Windows 7 Pro 64 bit on my game machine a couple years ago, I disabled the Windows Update process in services.msc. Bam! One easy step and I've had no issues whatsoever with unwanted upgrades being forced on me, no nagging, no ads, nothing! Piece of cake, and total control!
A buddy of mine was playing an online game when the game closed out and a Windows upgrade for Windows 10 appeared. It just closed out his programs and began the upgrade. If only we could stop these Microsoft bastards!
https://www.jerrypournelle.com...
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I believe microsoft's internal codename for their Windows 10 update program is "Weeping Angels".
I'm happy about this. For too long thrte have been too many ve4sions of windows in use. Having just one will make tbings easier for developers.
So, Microsoft, are you stupid such that you don't know what your products are doing, or are you intentionally not listening to what your users are telling you?
Based on the fact that you're still pushing the POS Metro interface on us, I'm betting it's the latter.
But hey, you got me to install PC-BSD on my main desktop, you got me to migrate from all but one Windows-only program running on my laptop, and I'm still looking at alternatives for that one. I will be Windows-free at home before I'd upgrade to 10.
And at work, in our next upgrade cycle I will be shifting us to web-dependent versions of all our applications so we can kiss Windows goodbye at our 50-workstation office as well.
Heckuva job, Satya!
Whether the devs of the software that breaks until Windows 10 are competent or not is beside the point, if you need to use that software regardless and Windows 10 is being shoved down your throat.
I'd consider updating to a new version of Windows, when they fix the bloody UI, and give us a way to actually turn off the telemetry crap. For the UI, it really wouldn't be that hard for them to create a Windows 7 theme, for Windows 10, which would just leave the other big issue being the spying crap.
I just received a call from a client who (finally) reported that when the office staff arrived this Monday morning and turned on their computers, every Windows 7 Pro computer had been updated without consent or user intervention to Windows 10 over the weekend. Microsoft is flat out lying about what is going on. This is the absolute worst possible abuse by a vendor I have ever seen. As a Microsoft partner I want to be fully compensated for having to perform a rollback on these systems. My client didn't ask for it and they should not have to pay to have their systems restored.
Microsoft is ignorant of the actual cause of this. Or at least one cause.
For decades this has been a problem, in several different ways.
If a popup window appears when someone is actually working, whatever they are typing is suddenly diverted into the popup window. The popup can receive that and close, so fast that the user might not even see it. And not even know what they have "agreed" to!
This means that, technically, it is not possible to show that a user has agreed to -anything-. And none of the "agreements" are binding, for anything.
Unix and Linux and most others do Not do this. It takes a mouse click to select the popup on other OS types.
Microsoft is not propperly testing stuff and might not even know how... 8-(
Seriously, this supposed "forced upgrades" don't happen. People leave the box checked when they run updates. Because 99.9999999999 percent of computer users are fucking hapless idiots.