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Windows 10 Anniversary Update To Roll Out On August 2

Posted by msmash on from the affinity-for-Windows-updates dept.

Windows 10's first major update -- dubbed Anniversary Update -- will be released to users on August 2, according to a blog post published by Microsoft (Archive link). The company presumably posted the blog post ahead of the original publication plans, and as a result, quickly pulled the story. Windows 10 Anniversary Update will bring with it a number of major changes including extensions to Edge, and improvements to Cortana and Hello biometric feature. It will also mark the end of the one-year free Windows 10 update offer for Windows 7 and Windows 8.x users.

3 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Anniversary update.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And then I have to re-turnoff Cortana, reset the switches to block MS-bound data, and in general, try
    to discover the new ways MS has made sure to F-up things so they can anal-probe my machine...

    1. Re:Anniversary update.... by vux984 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Even if you "turn off" Cortana, it's still running in the background.

      Yes and no. Yes, there absolutely is a process called Cortana running in the background. But its not still listening to your microphone, etc. Its providing backend services for stuff like location services.

      What's in a name?

      In theory Microsoft should have broken the functionality into two separate modules. "Cortana Personal Assistant" and "Cortana Services". Where the former is JUST the voice-mic-UI stuff; and the latter does all the other stuff -- the search functionality, location services, and provides the hooks that other apps connect to to add their "cortana" functionality, should you ever turn Cortana back on. ... of course people like your self would still freak about "Cortana Services" running even after the "Cortana Personal Assistant" went away so instead of calling it "Cortana Services" it should be called "wcmi_support" or something suitably innocuous. Then when you looked at the process list, nothing would be *called* cortana and you'd now be happy.

      Although nothing changed at all except the name of a process.

      Sometimes I think Microsoft should rename the Task Scheduler from "Schedule" to "Clippy" and "svchost" to "systemd" just for the fireworks display.

  2. Re:question... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    No. It will still upgrade to Windows 10 but then encrypt the hard disk until you pay for the upgrade.