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Microsoft Will Now Pester Windows 7 Users To Upgrade To Windows 10 With Pop-ups (betanews.com)

Posted by msmash on from the up-next dept.

Mark Wilson writes: Anyone who is still using Windows 7 doesn't have much longer until the operating system is no longer supported by Microsoft. Come January 14, 2020 only those enterprise customers who are willing to pay for Extended Security Updates will receive any kind of support. Microsoft has already done a lot to encourage Windows 7 diehards to make the move to Windows 10, and now it is stepping things up a gear. Throughout 2019, the company will show pop-up notifications in Windows 7 about making the switch to the latest version of Windows.

10 of 271 comments (clear)

  1. The company will, but I won't by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Because I turned off updates years ago.

    1. Re:The company will, but I won't by supremebob · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Yeah, I don't remember the Windows XP update warning messages being all that effective, either. I just disabled them, and then hacked my Windows XP box into thinking that it was a POSReady 2009 system to get another 5 years worth of updates.

      POSReady 7 still gets updates until 2021. I wonder if that same registry hack will still work...

    2. Re:The company will, but I won't by exomondo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      macOS is just as bad, it does exactly the same thing if you don't upgrade. Periodically popping up a notification in the top right hand screen which, unlike most notifications that display there, you can't simply hit "Dismiss", the only options are "Install" and "Details", the latter opens up the update in the App Store program.

  2. Good luck with that by xack · · Score: 3, Interesting

    China still has 10% market share for Windows XP. There will still be substantial Windows 7 usage in the 2030s. Businesses wih critical workloads that can’t be rebooted all he time for “updates” means that 7 isn’t going anywhere.

  3. Re:Too bad MacOS isn't broken beyond repair by demon+driver · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Linux is out, because of specific software packages I use that do not support Linux.

    May I ask which ones? I ask because that was what I thought until the end of 2017, when out of sheer frustration with the idea of having to move to Windows 10 in the foreseeable future I just gave Linux a try. The plan was to resort to Wine and/or a Windows 7 VM for those Windows applications I really cannot do without yet. I wasn't too optimistic, I saw a less-than-fifty-percent chance for it working out well. But it did. A few weeks later, all machines in the household (the other inhabitant had been very sympathetic to the plan, too) had been converted to Linux as the only or primary OS, and we have never looked back. There's just one thing I've been asking myself once or twice – why did I wait that long?

  4. Re:There is a quite easy way to kill win7 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Exactly, release Win10 LTSC as a standalone OS instead of keeping it to inaccessible Enterprise licenses.

  5. If only W10 Pro was more like W10 Enterprise... by toejam13 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Many of my complaints about Windows 10 are absent in the enterprise branch and long-term servicing branch of Windows 10. The problem is that the cost of obtaining legal copies of those branches for personal use is ridiculously high. So I continue to use Windows 7 Ultimate, even if it means sticking with my aging PC and having to resort to tricks to keep the updates coming (remember the point-of-sales trick for XP?).

    If people could install Windows 10 and have it look and act somewhat similar to Windows 7 without having to resort to exotic editions, registry hacks, or third-party tools, I think a lot of people would finally jump ship, even if they had to pay extra for those features. I sure would.

    I say this as someone who just this week had to roll their own installation DVD in order to install Windows 7 on a new NVMe SSD. So I am set for a while longer.

    1. Re:If only W10 Pro was more like W10 Enterprise... by hairyfeet · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Have you tried 8.1+ClassicShell? Looks and acts like Win 7 (or XP if you prefer) but with better hardware support and faster boot times, updates are rock solid, and it took less than 3 minutes to turn off any phone home BS and in the 2 years I've been running it it never once has turned back on. I have to say its been a hell of a workstation OS, as good as XP X64 was back in the day, even win 7 wasn't this rock solid and hassle free.

      I deal with enough customers with Win 10 to know its a "do NOT want" for me, the updates are buggy as fuck, every patch you have to go through tons of settings as MSFT might just decide to reset everything back to default (because "fuck you 10 Home and Pro user you are a beta tester for our REAL customers and a source for data mining" seems to be their mantra for Win 10 these days) and it generally seems less stable than Vista RTM. 8.1 OTOH has been a treat, not a single crash, it even handled a dying GPU without crashing, and never gets in the way of what I'm doing.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  6. offer upgrade for free again... by roc97007 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ...and I might consider it.

    --
    Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
  7. I'll Miss The Games by ewhac · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Some of us remember the jaw-dropping arrogance and hubris Micros~1 demonstrated with their Get Windows 10 (GWX) initiative:

    • The new icon in the systray that was an advertisement, and couldn't be disabled (unless you knew the exact KB numbers to uninstall),
    • The pop-up windows nagging you to take the upgrade before it was "too late,"
    • Downloading a multi-gigabyte hairball containing the update to your system drive -- without your knowledge or consent -- "just in case" you finally said yes,
    • Turning your PC into a Bittorrent node to distribute the update to other PCs, because why should Micros~1 pay for their own bandwidth when they can leech off everyone else's,
    • Using maliciously confusing prompts to trick people into accepting the upgrade, even -- and especially -- after they'd already explicitly said No several times,
    • The upgrades that failed,
    • The rollbacks that failed,
    • The machines that Win10 just plain didn't, and never would, support,
    • Arrogating all system administration to themselves, and still constantly fscking it up,
    • The promises and features that, to the surprise of no one who's been paying the slightest attention for the last 35 years, were never delivered -- shitty security, shitty performance, shitty UI, system updates that could break the machine at any given time, and device driver updates that never worked.

    So I guess my question to Micros~1 is: What in your brain-worm-infested minds do you imagine has induced us to change our opinions on this matter? You are every bit as incompetent and every bit as untrustworthy as you were five years ago, ten years ago, 20 years ago...

    Windows exists in my house solely to play games. If you feel you can't handle that duty any longer without completely fscking over my machine, then I guess I'll have to learn to live with just NetHack.

    TL;DR: The Answer Is No.

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    Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions