A few days ago I was visiting family, and my Mom was online Skyping relatives on her Windows 7 PC. She comes running into the other room and says her PC just restarted while she was talking, and now it says something about configuring Windows 10, even though she was always careful to opt-out of the constant requests to upgrade.
So, we had to wait for it to install the OS, then decline the terms of service, then wait for it to roll-back to the previous OS. I'm using Windows 10 and enjoy it, but I'm still tempted to migrate to another OS just because of these practices.
I have mixed feelings about this. I'm with you 100% on having the explicit opportunity to opt out of updates like this. That said, a large swath of Windows users are not nearly as technically literate as you and your mother are, and automatically helping people forward (if for nothing else, security fixes and ongoing support) is a Good Thing in my book (so long as it's free, and it is).
There is no doubt there are cogent arguments against it. But when I think of the operating systems a lot of botnet computers are running on, I have a hard time not supporting automatic OS upgrades for non-power users.
Support it if you want, but you seriously think it's OK for the PC to restart in the middle of a call? What if the user is doing something mission critical; it's acceptable to just wait an hour (or more likely several) to get back to work because "MS knows best"?? There is nothing to stop it from just doing it all over again either. I will never use Windows again because of this behavior.
My biggest aggravation with Windows is the pattern of unapproved restarts.
Sure, there's usually a setting to disable it, and a popup to delay it, but it's not really enough. The setting appears unreliable at best, and the popup is useless when it pops under fullscreen programs.
It really only takes one ill-timed restart to damn an OS forever, especially when the restart is chased by lengthy (and impossible to decline) downtime while a patch or upgrade is installed. Restarting on someone during a Skype interview or business call is shockingly unacceptable, no matter how sensible the average case.
My biggest issue with Windows Update (specifically) is that it has absolutely no clue what a laptop is. If I'm on a laptop, I'm likely to be out working from site to site, so don't force me to keep my laptop ON so updates can install! Ugh. This is just stupid-headed engineering.
I love the "We will install updates at 3:30am". I'd really like to see you try. My laptop will be in my bag in the hotel room at 3:30am. Hilton will be really happy with you burning the building down when you remotely switch on my Thinkpad with no ventilation.
Yeah, I haven't either, that's why I said "I'd love to see you try". You'd think the system would be smart enough to realize that it's literally never been awake at 3:30am.
I experience that constantly on any laptop I use because I pretty much never turn them off - they go to sleep mode when not used. Every now and then I find the laptop running with a clean desktop after logging in - because it decided to reboot and install updates somewhen during the night.
I've been an enemy of automated updates ever since, many years ago, I went to the kitchen to boil the water for a tea, and there suddenly I heard the PC speaker beeping - oh, Windows decided to count down from "5 minutes" and reboot.
That's just P* poor quality and lack of care at Microsoft. When I think of automatic updates, I am thinking about automatic security updates on Ubuntu server. I'm sure canonical will screw things up at some point as well though.
I guess it is easy and tempting to say "just turn it off and on again" on consumer electronics and end user computers. :/
Why would an application become non-functional when an update is pending? Perhaps a critical security vulnerability?
It also has no clue what a server is. Servers with Windows 2012 R2, force the users to reboot. How stupid are microsoft, that they assume that people will be ok with rebooting production servers in the middle of the day.
> The setting appears unreliable at best, and the popup is useless when it pops under fullscreen programs
This! Anyone saying this is new behavior caused by the Windows 10 update has never been booted out of a WoW raid at 3 am because the restart pop-up didn't show beneath the game window. Windows Update has been doing this since XP.
The interesting thing here is that Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 all improved the Windows Update restart timing logic and made it more transparent. (There's a section that states "A restart is planned, Windows has determined the most likely idle time to try the restart is 3:43am" now, for instance.)
In this case it's Windows 7's Restart logic that is old/bad (and long has been), not Windows 10, but Windows 10 of course is getting blamed for it, not Windows 7.
It's another reason people should stop worrying and upgrade to Windows 10. ;)
In my opinion, there is never a good time to restart. That is simply an artifact of the sad historical circumstances that led to the current state of operating systems.
I don’t particularly enjoy waking up to all my programs are closed because Windows decided that tonight was the night that it restarted.
It’s slightly better on MacOS, where programs using MacOS-specific APIs can restore their state on startup, but that doesn’t include most of the third-party applications. But MacOS doesn’t force the reboot. Yet.
One of the things I thought Windows 8 did really right was trying to instill into applications the lifecycle that they could be force closed/rebooted at any time and should be good at saving and restoring state across application starts. This is good beyond just system restarts and good in general to know that applications would typically come back to where you left off after the system losing connectivity or going to sleep or unloading an application to save memory/CPU while you aren't actively using it.
The complaints about this lifecycle model from app developers is that is hard to program for. Windows 8 was also strict enough forcing this lifecycle (closing out applications sometimes seconds after minimizing and attempting to restore them quickly on window restore) that it showed how bad developers can be at programming hard things like proper app lifecycle management, so they begged Windows to be less strict about it.
(That was one of the magic things about Windows 8 that Windows 10 doesn't quite replicate: minimizing a properly built application and watching the application's memory and CPU usage quickly drop to zero.)
That's the very reason I didn't use any Metro apps on my work computer. They would get swapped out of memory and killed whenever I ALT+TABbed from them. Not joking. Every time I wanted to switch to a normal app for a second and then back to the Metro one, the latter would have to "restore" itself (and guess what, it never restored to the point I last left it).
Of course I know the reason - that's because my machine is memory constrained, I routinely run on ~90% RAM usage. But hey, that 8GB of RAM isn't here for vacation, it's to be used.
Personally, I find the mobile app lifecycle - which is where they took the idea from - to be incredibly annoying. I like to have control both when applications die and when they start up (which, on Android, is utterly unpredictable).
The problem with this lifecycle assumption is that there is no way to opt out.
I have a "metro" style SSH application, and windows regularly decides it should close it, which kills my active SSH sessions.
I understand that they removed the ability to opt-out to force developers to change to a more appropriate model, but there are cases where a task cannot be suspended (because, for example, it's interacting with another computer). Having to re-log-in to my ssh session the 4th or 5th time in an hour is absolutely infuriating.
You can opt out by creating a background process. The thing that makes that part complicated is that there is a background process lifecycle to learn (including interactions between a UI process and background process). Also, Windows wants a bit more of an explicit knowledge than say classic Win32 about what the background process is for so it can best manage it.
The support for background processes continues to improve. Windows 10, for instance, now supports a "single instance" background processing model where background processes can be seen as an invocation of the UI app (if already running) and vice versa (the UI app is presented as an invocation to the background process if that is already running) with hand-offs from one to the other, simplifying the programming of some of the interactions between background and UI for some apps.
On the other hand, many/most distributions have major releases every 6-12 months, and the upgrade process is a lot more hit and miss. I have Debian and (unexpectedly enough...) Fedora services that I've managed to drag along two and, respectively, three major releases. On the other hand, I can't remember ever managing to get a clean upgrade on Ubuntu after 8.04 or so. My latest attempt has been miserable, I spent half a day nursing my Ubuntu station at work back to health.
Besides, it's a trend that I expect to see reversed soon enough, given the direction in which Linux desktop is heading nowadays.
Edit: empirically, what has greatly simplified my life in this matter is being old-fashioned about partitioning. I keep /home and /opt separate, so upgrading typically consists of saving a list of packages, wiping everything but /home and /opt, doing a fresh install and reinstalling the packages. Depending on what I'm installing (OpenBSD on my laptop, Debian on my desktop) it takes about five minutes of accepting defaults and waiting for progress bars to fill, then another ten minutes until the packages installs (most of those ten minutes is spent on LaTeX, to be honest).
I used Gentoo for a very long time (2005-ish to 2009 or so) and tried Arch, too, both back then (after I, uh, toasted a power supply compiling packages for five days straight) and more recently, about a year ago. It's a very good approach, but far too high-maintenance for my taste. During my (latest) short stint with Arch, I became a walking bug tracker. Stick to Adwaita because everything else breaks, don't do that in a KDE app because it crashes, try to reboot my computer only to find out it's stuck in a loop because some process can't notify some other process through D-Bus...
There's a bunch of stuff that doesn't work on Debian, either, but at least it's the same stuff for about a year or so.
Nowadays I get to write Linux software at work so I get all the bleeding-edge stuff there, and dealing with the latest and greatest breakage is part of my everyday job. I have no desire to do it at home, too.
Edit: plus, to put it bluntly, it's really no longer fun. When I said goodbye to Windows, back in nineteen-ninety-something, I did it to get away from the mind-boggling complexity and uncustomizable blackbox blurb on my hard drive.
Nowadays, it's an order of magnitude more complex; some of it is unwarranted and much of it just isn't reliable. Windows' and OS X's isn't, either, but at least it's nicely tucked away behind an interface that works, so you're not exposed to the crap underneath. I spend a lot more time wrestling with my computer than I'd like to.
I can mostly navigate through this whole maze of thisandthatkit and systemd-everything, largely because I'm exposed to it for eight hours a day, whether I want it or not, and have seen it being developed. But I don't think it's sustainable, and I have a feeling I'm going to call it quits one day.
Best i can tell the complexity comes from a misguided idea that if just the DEs simplify and automate common tasks, Linux on the desktop will happen.
End result is that the DE people keep pushing ever deeper in the stack, violating long standing layering, that made it easier to reason about why something broke, in the process.
This type of grass is always greener answer is why the Linux desktop experience is so poor. If someone follows that advice they may fix one issue they have but in return they get a whole new set of problems to discover and troubleshoot or run away from.
They say that using Linux is constantly solving some problems, only for the solutions to produce more problems for you to tackle. You stop when the next problem you face is not annoying enough to care.
There was a point, somewhere between 2009ish and 2011ish, when that was really no longer true, except for the distributions that hopped on the PulseAudio boat really early and had audio broken for a few releases.
I have no idea what happened after that but it's really screwed up.
Microsoft restarts because updates are in files that are "locked" and can't be switched-out until the system is rebooted. After you install the update, but before you reboot, your system is still running the old known-buggy code.
Linux doesn't lock files; instead it creates in-memory copies of them. So the updater can update the on-disk version without any troubles. But if you think about it, it has the exact same problem: until you reboot, your Linux box is still running the known-buggy code.
So there's absolutely no technical reason Windows needs to reboot more than Linux. The only difference is that Linux developers decided "meh, the user can reboot when they want". But unless you reboot after installing your Linux updates, your computer still has the bugs.
How do they solve the problem without requiring, at minimum, closing all of the user's applications and restarting them, then closing all system services and restarting them? (At which point, you've basically done a de-facto OS restart.)
On Windows, once in a while there is a Patch Tuesday when the only update is Internet Explorer, a program that I neither wanted, nor installed, nor opened since I got tired of it years ago. Clearly, I need to reboot my computer for this.
On Ubuntu, certain packages are labeled as needing a reboot, and when you update them the control menu thing with a gear in the upper-right corner turns red, and the Update utility says you should reboot. Then you know you should, but it doesn’t force you to.
EDIT: There’s also Ksplice, which was going be a standard until Oracle bought it, and Red Hat kpatch. Those allow you to update a kernel without rebooting. Most other programs still require restarting, but Linux benefits from a saner architecture, where the web browser isn’t an “integral part of the operating system,” and the font renderer for the GUI and for printing is not part of the kernel. You need to reboot less.
Jameskegel said that in any "mainstream distributions", after you run an update but before you reboot, the OS is running the updated libraries. I honestly don't understand how that is possible.
No, what you said was: "until you reboot, your Linux box is still running the known-buggy code"
And then later in the same post (just so we're clear about what you said): "But unless you reboot after installing your Linux updates, your computer still has the bugs."
>How do they solve the problem without requiring, at minimum, closing all of the user's applications and restarting them, then closing all system services and restarting them? (At which point, you've basically done a de-facto OS restart.)
Settle down. You seem to be taking some heat in the comments, so I'll recuse myself from this discussion, as I feel we are no longer making progress in an intellectual context.
It would help to "make progress in an intellectual context" if you'd deign to back-up the claim you made, which I now strongly suspect was simply incorrect from the start.
If with this you mean requiring a restart then arent' you wrong? Ubuntu is linux, right, so it's an operating system, and it has stuff like /var/run/reboot-required.pkgs so it's not like all linux flavors out there don't ever require reboots.
If you meant forced restarts at a given time (or whatever windows 10 does) then you're right. For now, and hopefully forever.
That's not an excuse. Microsoft can and has been pushing updates to 7 to enable the constant upgrade nagging. They've even been continually pushing new updates that get more and more naggy. There is nothing preventing them from including an update that makes 7's restart logic less sadistic, but they've chosen not to do that.
Can you explain to me why Microsoft should expend time and effort to encourage behavior (staying on Windows 7) that increases their costs and increases fragility in their ecosystem? I'm not sympathetic to the dark patterns they use to push people to upgrade, but I'm 100% onboard with not pushing improvements to an older operating system.
Because we paid for their OS and expect it to be supported ?
Windows 8 was out in 2013, 3 fraking years ago. Even Ubuntu, which is free, has LTS supported for 5 years.
When you pay good money for an OS you use in your business, it's damn logical you want it to last you almost a decade without having to play the upgrade game all over again.
I don't have time for that. I don't have the money for that. And I don't need that. The OS is not a product I want to think about, it's this transparent thing that I'm supposed to forget while I doing actual work.
This Windows upgrade is uneeded and unwanted.
Yet it kept comming back to disturb me in my work with stupid notifications, reminding me that one day, it may reboot my computer at the worst moment, eat all my hard drive space or make me loose hours locking my computer.
What happened ? Well, one day my windows pratition broke for some reason I can't figure out and I got a perpetual guest account. I'm not even trying to fix it. I just stay 100% of my time on my Ubuntu one, because I don't want to deal with it.
> Because we paid for their OS and expect it to be supported ?
The upgrade is free. You are being supported. You can choose not to upgrade (and I think you're wrong, but it is your choice). What I don't understand the mindset behind "no, I won't upgrade, but I want a bunch of feature-change patches without making me upgrade" (as with the assertion that the auto-restart logic could/should be changed for Windows 7, not Windows 8).
No, forcing a version change using the excuse of security is not being supported. Ubuntu has security patches for 5 years and it's free. I pay for windows, give me my security patches.
What about a computer that runs a specific piece of software (say, Mach3 for CNC control) that doesn't have a win10 alternative. It only runs in windows 7 32 bit. There is no good alternative. I would prefer to make the determination that the machine will NEVER update. I just need it to remain the same until mach 3 updates or an alternative comes along.
Then disconnect it from the internet, and disable automatic updates... easy, peasy.
edit: regarding downvotes... if the software versioning is mission critical for a system, then having automatic updates and being connected to an external network is a risk to that critical system. I wasn't trying to be pedantic, but was being perhaps more terse than some may appreciate.
I disagree. Outdated and thus soon malware-ridden systems are a threat to all systems connected directly or indirectly to them, so users are obliged either to keep their systems clean and up-to-date. Either themselves or through experts, or through automated servicing.
Much like how cars must be serviced in regular intervals if they are to be operated on shared infrastructure (roads).
Well, that's a reasonable point of view, but it's not Microsoft's job to make it happen. I could see a reasonable case for the idea that people should be held liable for hosting malware on their computers, and that failing to patch security holes could have some kind of secondary liability consequences. If that were the law, it might well make sense for Microsoft to offer upgrade contracts as a form of insurance. Refusing to accept an upgrade would then reasonably terminate the insurance agreement, and it would now be your job to keep your machine safe. Most people wouldn't be up for that and would probably opt to upgrade instead.
But that is not the world we live in, and those are not the rules in play, and even if they were, forcibly updating people's machines against their wishes would not be the solution.
Except MS is the one who cops the blame, the negative PR and the reputation of being insecure when malware runs rife across old Windows systems that weren't patched for years.
There's literally no way they can win this. If they force updates they're evil for rebooting PCs. If they don't, users don't update because it's always inconvenient and then they blame MS on malware.
There is a difference between regular mandated services and waking up one morning to find they have replaced my much loved (and customized) Mercedes with a bloody Skoda.
They should simply perform their obligations around providing fixes for the product for the duration of the advertised support period.
That they are running software on thousands or hundreds of thousands of machines that was advertised as an update but is instead advertware is a crap move on their part. It's probably not a strong legal argument, but IMO they should be paying me to use my system to run software of their choice, much in the way that I would pay to use Azure to run software of my choice on their systems.
I'll agree that the nagware aspect is pretty harsh, but disagree they shouldn't have pushed it via autoupdate... it really is an opportunity to update/upgrade to a new version... or would you expect ubuntu to not tell you there's a new version you can upgrade to as well?
That said, I'm kind of with GP, I'd rather have most people updated to the current windows, spyware issues aside, it's better for stability/security.
IF you have enough time to push an update that causes people's computers to shut down and install a new operating system in the middle of a Skype call, then you have enough time to fix that glaring problem.
The only reason for me to upgrade is DirectX 12 exclusivity, a practice I personally abhor, and always have. Luckily, there are no games on the PC that use DirectX12 beyond some hackjob implementations for DX11 games. I think I'll be just fine on Windows 7.
I may upgrade when the OS is "finished." For now, though, I think I'll let others trudge through the mud of a forced public beta.
Maybe, just maybe, I might take the plunge when the video games I built my PC for actually require me to.
Oh, frak their idea of "idle time". I went to settings to change it, I honestly wanted to give it a reasonable time window when I'm not likely to use the machine. Guess what? The "busy time" is limited to 8 hours. Because no one ever uses a computer for more than 8 hours a day? Well, but I do. Frak that.
Windows 7 would forcibly shut down and reboot, without warning or indication, if you delayed updates long enough. Any laptop I owned with 7 could and often did spontaneously restart, no matter what I was doing.
I'm not shy about installing updates, but if I'm busy working I would delay it a couple times. Then I'd not use the laptop for a few days (with it in sleep mode), by then I'd have forgotten about the update. I was bitten by forced reboots in 7 many times.
8 added a "Your PC will reboot in 15 minutes" and that was so much better from a laptop perspective. W10 insider builds currently tell you to set "inactive hours", and this works fairly well for both phone and laptop. My phone updates while I sleep, my laptop pings me to reboot at my leisure, for it is never awake & inactive.
It was either not fully thought out, or Microsoft's analysis figured that it would cost less to do it this way.
Anecdote: When I worked dispatch, the local Network Operations Center pushed out an update that forcibly rebooted all of our Windows workstations...including the machine that ran inbound emergency calls. The admins at the NOC didn't think that anyone would dial 911 at three in the morning. No malfeasance, but a simple lack of foresight.
See, this is a GREAT comparison, because thinking, "No one will call 911 at 3am" EASILY falls into the realm of destructive negligence. Like "I didn't realize these cars could be hit from the side!" or, "I didn't realize how much worse I drive when I am drunk, officer!"
In the 3am 911 case, those admins could EASILY have cost LIVES with their decision. If that inbound call handler's machine had updates waiting, or more especially had any difficulty installing those updates, you could've had HOURS of downtime in a scenario where MINUTES mean life or death!
I guess my main point is that naivete like that is called criminal negligence and is punishable under the law in many cases. There may have been no malicious intent, but in a case so potentially catastrophic, it hardly matters, and if those admins didn't get into DEEP TROUBLE, they're either very lucky or your administrative discipline system is VERY broken.
And Microsoft is straying into similar territory with this whole thing.
That's why you have change control meetings with a change advisory board. Yes they're boring and yes very often the changes don't affect you at all, but it's really nice to hear an admin say "we're taking down critical system X at Y time" and have the ability to say "no you won't, that's when Operation Z is being run".
And that's why a liaison from the "business" side of the organization should be in those meetings too.
I'm working in Antarctica and we BARELY caught one of our science systems a couple hours before it was about to kick off that stupid auto-upgrade. It would have broke a very expensive and custom box built to run these experiments, which was transported down here at great cost. If I hadn't been wandering by checking on something else I'd never have seen the window and it would've wrecked some poor grantee's years and years of work, just like that.
Every grantee and science group is different, and builds their boxes back in the States with varying levels of IT competence. Being a wizard in geothermal imaging doesn't mean you're a wizard in building Windows 10 boxes.
So there's all these varying groups (we support over 20 different science groups on our station alone) building their custom boxes on a variety of OS's and hardware to support all their strange sensors and equipment, and many of them are so specialized that no one is allowed to touch them. Nearly all science systems run Windows 7 or some flavor of Linux, and because there is literally YEARS of work leading up to one of these systems appearing on station, we are loath to touch them for fear of breaking some long-running or fragile science project.
In this situation I used my best judgement and determined that blocking Windows 10 would prevent more problems than it would cause for this group, and fortunately I was right.
Right; but you're solving a symptom, not the problem. It sounds like what you really need is some sort of approval process, or at the very least a checklist, to ensure these machines are configured in the way they should be. Or, at the very least, that the teams involved understand the implications of a computer sitting in a base in the middle of nowhere with auto-updates turned on.
The point I was trying to make is that the problem you're seeing isn't specific to Windows 10; it could have easily happened on Windows 7 or 8 or 8.1 instead.
I just did the Windows 10 upgrade on my laptop and at no point could I start the upgrade without explicitly clicking a button. In addition, the process starts by immediately rebooting (after downloading via Windows update and asking you to start it).
That's a really interesting story. Let me tell you another one. Both my wife's and my son's computers updated automatically, with no button presses on their parts, even after them pressing "do not update" on all the nag screens for the past several months.
You at least have accept the license agreement, which is true of almost every piece of software. I've still got half my machines on Windows 7/8 and I haven't upgraded them yet.
On this laptop I actually had it download Windows 10 but I wasn't ready to upgrade so I held it off for another week. I still had to press something to get it to start.
I’ve never seen this. Partly it may be A/B testing and I was never in the B group, but I think people are closing dialog boxes without thinking enough about how they’re closing them, and accidentally agreeing to upgrade.
No matter the dialog box, closing it should always mean "do nothing and go back to where I was before", not "do your sneaky crap later when I'm asleep or busy". Anything else is a malignant antipattern.
No, I said, “how” they’re closing it. If you click the OK button, the dialog box should close but you would expect something to happen. The issue is that people are unhealthily conditioned into clicking Cancel, and Flash and Java never get updated, and everything is terrible. So, Microsoft designed a dialog that is less likely to get Canceled.
Now there are reports that Windows 10 is installing when you click the X in the title bar. I have not seen this happen. Maybe this does happen, but on the other hand, I always see people closing dialog boxes without fully reading and comprehending what they say. With the scheduled install option, your unwitting “choice” could even have been days ago.
I think the situation is sort of bad, but the situation started sort of bad. "No software project is ever done, so you are always really buying a subscription, and the sooner you realize it, the sooner you can act like it." - Neal Ford. More to the point, Windows was never yours. It was always Microsoft’s. As long as you are using something that is not yours, it’s advantageous to use the latest, best-maintained version that you are able to use.
Don't Chrome and Firefox do this by default now? Automatically download an update in the background and install it without asking when you close the browser window?
Do not compare an a paid OS I run a business on which upgrade one entire version, force rebooting, freezing my machine and introducing incompatibilities and spywares with
an free opensource browser that I can merely swap with any competitor at a click of a button in my start menu.
I don't run my main source of income on Firefox or Android. I didn't pay a licence for a browser or a phone OS. I can't find a quick alternative as quickly for my dev laptop as I can for those.
Hopefully I got a dual boot and make sure I don't boot Windows anymore, otherwise it would be really dangerous, as I could be giving a training and suddenly get my machine locked for some undesired upgrade in from of my customers.
Hey whoa, calm down there. What's really funny is you're getting upset but then ignore all the people who do make their main source of income in Firefox or Chrome, and need the stability in their browsers to support a specific feature. Remember IE6 and how many applications were coded exactly to that browser? And then people bitched that Microsoft didn't automatically update that browser, even though doing so would have broken compatibility with a ton of business apps.
For me, OS doesn't matter one bit. Sure, one could be more convenient with certain features, but in the long run, everything I do at work depends on the browser, and specifically depends on Firefox. The application I support at work is programmed to work on Firefox and it's the only browser it's tested on. If Mozilla made some breaking change and I was automatically upgraded, my work comes to a screeching halt. Maybe I don't even notice something is broken until I'm giving a client demo. Pretty embarrassing, huh?
So yeah, I can compare an OS to a browser, because the same purpose that the OS serves for you, the browser serves for me. I can't just switch browsers with a click of a button. I can't find an alternative. It's Firefox or nothing, a supported version of Firefox or nothing. Funny how some people have different needs, and funny how some people can dismiss those needs without even a thought, just because they may not apply to themselves.
But luckily my work controls what version of Firefox is released to our PCs. It's not pushed to our internal yum repositories until it's been tested. And funny enough, if your business really depends on a stable Windows environment, you have the tools to do the exact same thing. I recommend you use them.
First, you haven't paid for that software. Secondly, this software is an execution environment on an another machine, so you don't have control over it's update cycle, even if it wasn't auto update. Finally, version updates in browser can not be compared in any way to an OS version update, they are usually quite minor. Besides, when they do break something, you got thousand of publication telling you it's comming and what's it gona do to your code.
There is no such thing here. You are on your machine, minding your own business on something you have paid, expecting support for it. You are harassed with an upgrade you don't need and you refuse. Then you are updated against your will, sometime it reboot in a moment you need it and lock your machine for some time. And then if you do accept the upgrade (out of "I don't have time for this s*"), you don't know what's going to break. Your scanner ? Your drawing tablet ? Personnaly, my login broke, it's in a state of a perpetual guest session.
Now compare that to Ubuntu, luckily on my second partition. It's supported for 5 years despite the fact I didn't pay for it, and doesn't force me to upgrade. Oh, and it's not full of spywares.
There's a pretty sizable difference between chrome updates and updating from 7 to 10. The fundamentals of chrome remain the same, and for 99% of users they don't notice a difference.
Granted, they've never really done a "chrome 2" style of upgrade, and I'm curious how they'll handle it.
On the pop-ups that appear on my Windows 7 machine, there is no button they says "Do Not Update"; both buttons (Update now, update later) lead the system to download and install Windows 10. That both of your users report explicitly clicking a button that references update makes me suspicious that they in fact just clicked the wrong button.
Sneaky of Microsoft, but I'm having trouble buying these tales of the OS going rogue. I just haven't seen any way for that to happen.
But the upgrade still requires that the user accept the EULA. I agree that the system is hostile to user preference (any reports of a computer behaving in a way the user doesn't expect should be examined, whether the user "should know better" or not) but it's important to get to the bottom of exactly what happened, and sometimes that requires figuring it what the user actually did, not just what they report they did. Anyone who has worked in tech support has this instinct.
However, consider it also from the user's POV. The update will download gigabytes of data, will do everything possible to get anything from the user that can pass as "agreement" and then update the software. Then it will reboot machine and present the new EULA.
If the user disagrees with the EULA, it will restore the original system - but not right now. It will take tens of minutes (not everyone has SSD) and during this time, the users is practically locked out of using the computer. If you are small entrepreneur, this is basically time when you cannot work and it's not your fault. Some of these folks cannot afford to wait a hour or so for the system to restore.
And this will be not final - who guaranteed that the windows update will not try again in a few weeks, once Microsoft steps up the campaign again?
I wonder if the EULA is enforceable at all, given the circumstances. "Accept or I'll break your computer for hours" seems like a contract accepted under duress.
I've had various problems with running a long job, and then Windows popping up and saying it's going to restart shortly to install updates. Or I want to open my laptop to check something, and it demands the power plugged in so it can spend 10-20 minutes installing updates. I've worried about it doing this nonsense when I'm using it to do a presentation or something.
IIRC, you can specify a time of day to update, and mostly, you get an option to retry in 4 hours (or tomorrow, etc)... most corporate environments are using services to defer updates to scheduled times.. and at home, I just leave it on/auto. My understanding it's only after a few days of nagging that you can't defer the updates anymore.
If you can't reboot your computer for over two days, you may want to rethink your workflow... I tend to completely shutdown/restart at least every night/morning, and if I had critical pending updates, would probably let them run at lunch, just closing everything before that. This happens maybe once a month, and is just the cost of having a computer...
"Oh man, I have to stop my car and turn it off to get gas once a week. Or when I get my oil changed every few months..."
Ubuntu does it right. It only nags me when I log in, and I can dismiss it with a click, and I don't get nagged again until I log in again.
Edit: On Windows I often run jobs overnight that take 6-7 hours to complete. It's annoying to discover in the morning that Windows aborted my job to install some update, and I have to restart the thing for the next night. This never happens on Ubuntu.
Note, if you aren't on an LTS release, don't wait too long... my grandmother is on 14.10, and can no longer run updates (servers appear to be gone) and no clean upgrade path to 16.04, so I'll be copying her profile directory, and setting up the latest version... fortunately, she only uses the browser and a couple of old games installed via wine.
I use Windows 10 on my home workstation. Last week I was checking a few things in the morning before I left for work. Windows wanted to schedule updates, it suggested "9AM; because it doesn't look like you use your computer at that time."
That computer hosts a Linux VM which I connect to remotely from work and use for most of my development efforts... I use it every day without fail, yet Windows thinks my computer is "idle" simply because I'm not physically sitting at the terminal moving the mouse and keyboard.
I realize that's a perfectly reasonable heuristic for your average desktop user; but something about the messaging and voice of Windows 10 just really rubs me the wrong way. Previous versions of Windows seemed much less chatty, whereas now everything feels so presumptuous and autonomous all under the guise of "Cortana knows your habits better than you do."
I get that volunteering to beta-test comes with some pain, but I literally went to go use the bathroom mid-day, and I came back to Windows 10 reverting to an older build. Bizarre.
I think Microsoft went "too far" but I also agree that we don't want another "XP situation" with Windows 7. Effectively having 20%+ of the market on a super old OS holding back the industry and less secure.
Microsoft claim they're planning to avoid this in the future by no longer releasing named new OS's, and instead just update Windows 10 for "free" forever. Basically the same as Apple's current model with MacOS.
I guess how you fall on this topic is answered by the question: "Do the ends justify the means?"
I think we, the software industry, are very irresponsible when it comes to __planned obsolescence__ [1]. Computers from 10 years ago are very capable of doing most things common users want to do nowadays. However, many modern operating systems and applications make these computers unusable.
We are forcing users to upgrade software, and because of all the layers of cruft accumulated in this software, they are then forced to upgrade their hardware too. This just adds to a spiral of consumerism that is going to destroy our planet.
Like most of us, I like developing with the latest high level fancy cutting edge stack; but we have to remember that it's not the society's duty to empower the tech industry but the other way around. It is our role to help people solve people's their problems, and in ways that are effective socially and ecologically and does not create waste. This also means, making sure that hardware does not become obsolete because of our carelessness, lazyness or selfabsorpion as software makers.
Also, alternatives do exist.
I know someone in Cordoba (Spain) that recently started a __slow computing__ cooperative, inspired by this article [2]. His goal is to bring tech experts and ordinary people together to build custom solutions adapted to their needs. They have users go to them and do an interview with them. Then, they make a GNU/Linux and libre software installation for them, often reusing old hardware, adapted to their personal needs, and do the teaching necessary. I find this a very interesting approach, that solves the security problem both by installing updated software that does not create hardware obsolescence, and educating users so they regain control of their machines.
There is no valid excuse for Microsoft here. Your argument is the perfect example of how proprietary software puts end users as servants to the interest of owners of the proprietary code that control their machines.
Whether the OS is proprietary isn't the important facet of this issue. The case for encouraging users to move off of Windows XP is the same as the case for encouraging users to move off of older GNU/Linux distributions: security updates.
Even in a slow computing initiative, outside invention will continue. Take ASLR, DEP, and other memory corruption mitigations. The architects of the legacy, fixed-address systems didn't expect the large amount of vulnerability due to buffer overflows in programs that handle external input. The authors of these programs failed to write tests that exercised some edge cases of malformed input. While long/malformed input unit tests might seem germane today, they weren't then.
Custom software initiatives make sense for people who have a high aptitude and the time to undertake them. This use case doesn't fit the vast majority of people who use computers.
While Microsoft certainly deserved the $10k judgement against them, software authors have the duty to help mitigate past imperfections, errors, and lack of foresight in their software. Authors of free and proprietary software share this responsibility.
> Whether the OS is proprietary isn't the important facet of this issue.
The OS being proprietary is an important issue. With libre software, lightweight forks that still work in old hardware can be maintained. Also, the software stack can be customized. Note that it's not security patches what makes software slow, but the zillions of layers of indexers, UI frameworks written in three layers of dynamic languages, etc that are included in a desktop environment. A modern GNU/Linux distribution function decently on old hardware as soon as you swap the desktop environment. With either you upgrade to a 20GB OS with a desktop environment that requrires 2 gigs of ram and so on, or you are stuck with an unsupported Windows XP.
> Custom software initiatives make sense for people who have a high aptitude and the time to undertake them. This use case doesn't fit the vast majority of people who use computers.
The average american watches 4 hours of TV a day [1] and they spends more time on Facebook than taking care of their pets [2] and takes weeks of training in order to get a driving license. I think the average person has the time to spend one or two days, when they upgrade their computer, pairing with a technician to get to understand the software they have and how it works and how to protect themselves. It's a matter of priorities. Sadly, for a lot of the software industry, an empowered userbase is not in their best economic interest.
Upgrading software isn't (or shouldn't be) planned obsolescence. There's nothing inherent about software that means throwing away hardware. The only reason a Windows 7 machine wouldn't be able to run Windows 10 is if the hardware maker chose to not update their drivers, and at some point you have to stop blaming Microsoft for that.
There is no such thing as planned obsolescence when it comes to software. "Throwing away" software creates no pollution and Windows 10 runs on basically anything Windows 7 ran on.
>There is no valid excuse for Microsoft here.
There is no valid blame for Microsoft here. Windows 10 will run just fine on 10 year old hardware, as long as the device drivers are compatible.
How about 100% everything instead of "basically anything", without serious "if's" like "as long as drivers are compatible" ?
If a machine is running, say, windows xp, and it does in a manner that satisfies the owner's need, then it should be able to keep running forever in the same manner, provided that hardware lasts and/or is replaced with adequate spares, not necessarily anything newer.
It's ok if that computer becomes incompatible with newer software because of that.
It's ok if that computer becomes incompatible with newer outside/network services because of that.
It's not ok if that computer stops being able to execute exactly the same process that it could do 10 years ago.
That's exactly how it exists. What you're describing here is reality. If you have a machine running Windows XP and you never change anything, then nothing will change. Software doesn't magically bloat over time, those changes happen with updates that add new features. If you never update things, you'll stay on the same software revision and it will run the same as the day you bought it.
A company I used to work for in 2012 had a Windows 3.11 workstation running some ancient software to support an auxiliary system. Many banks run COBOL on mainframes and haven't changed anything since the 70s.
I'm really confused as to the argument here. If you never update your software and don't expect to browse the Internet, old software works exactly like it did in the past. How do you expect it would change?
The whole issue is that some machines been force-upgraded to windows 10 despite users explicitly (or so they thought) responding multiple times that no, they do not wish to upgrade; and then failing to work correctly because of e.g. driver issues.
This is not acceptable behavior - I can understand automatic upgrades that are fully backwards compatible, e.g. a security patch; but upgrade to windows 10 isn't like that.
Because Microsoft didn't write the drivers for 100% of hardware... and tbh, if a company wants they can pay Microsoft to write those initial drivers, and provided the hardware for testing, iirc, they tend to maintain those drivers between versions. There are plenty of drivers that are written by MS, it's pretty common with Printers iirc, and works pretty damned well.
Because foo pro-audio, or bar cnc-board didn't want to update their drivers, or for that matter, more often than not, had a weird installer that simply didn't follow proper practices, doesn't work in the new version of Windows isn't MS' fault.
Nevertheless, because the chance of something like that happening is clearly higher than 0.0000000001%, Microsoft should simply never do such a drastic upgrade automatically. (So, even within Windows 10, they should not automate all upgrades, because occasionally they will have to include bigger changes.)
Also, users will not understand this, and will, rightly, blame Microsoft.
Any trivial update has a higher than 0.0000000001% chance of failure... if you need that level of specificity, you should disable updates, and network connectivity altogether.
Upgrades aren't always entirely painless and without cost.
If the UI significantly changes, for instance, there will be a time investment needed to re-learn what you need to get work done. (This was a particularly nasty issue for Windows 8, not quite as bad for 10 but there are a few changes for sure.)
If the upgrade fails in any way, there may be significant time spent getting the computer back on-line. Sometimes this takes a very long time.
Software upgrades may actually introduce bugs. In the worst case scenario, some OS software upgrades have actually "bricked" devices (see: Apple iOS 9.3.2). These further impact productivity / take time to work around.
Some very old legacy programs may not work at all. It takes time to implement a new solution for the problem in a new tool. (This isn't a big issue for 7 to 10 from what I've heard, but you do hear this about other upgrades in the past.)
This cost in time is not nothing. If there is no real net benefit, it could end up being a big waste.
Even if people want to upgrade, IMHO the way Microsoft is pushing out the upgrade is quite bad. Usually in the enterprise world, IT departments tend to test new OS releases (and even patch updates) to make sure everything works, before rolling out the updates in the wild. They don't want a patch to break some mission critical software. The cost of that could be huge in some cases.
Even for Windows 7 retail to Windows 10 retail, I could see many people preferring to be cautious. Perhaps they are wanting to wait for a slightly more stable OS (usually the first release of a Windows version is a bit buggy). Some people also might want to test things out first, to make sure there are no problems. Of course there's those that don't want to update because change bad, but I don't think that's all cases.
Furthermore, a fair bit of Windows retail I'm sure is businesses - these tend to be even more cautious than overall consumers. A software update going wrong could cost them money, after all, and "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I honestly don't think the "rolling updates" model being pushed works for enterprise... even small ones.
If the machine is on the Internet, it needs security updates. Let's take that as an inviolate law of nature:
If the machine is on the Internet, it needs security updates
This isn't a proprietary vs. open source thing, this is a "level of effort" thing. Microsoft right now, if they discover a security bug, has to create a patch for:
* Windows XP SP2 (thanks to all those "extended support" buyers; the US Navy has purchased support through June 8, 2017, they are not the only ones)
* Windows Vista (yup; also "extended support" for another year)
* Windows 7
* Windows 8
* Windows 8.1
* Windows 10
Why does that matter?
* It requires (up to) 6 times the development time to develop a fix for the bug
* It requires 6 times the QA time
* It makes Microsoft far less responsive to bug reports because of the time required to come up with a fix
* It makes Microsoft set the bar higher on what bugs are "fixable" because of the cost of coming up with a fix
It makes life difficult for everybody, and it wastes a ton of time Microsoft could instead be spending making their product better instead of constantly digging-around in 17-year-old code.
Let's say you're Ubuntu, you're all open source-y and have that warm fuzzy feeling. You want people to use their 10 year old OS installs, no problem. Let's be generous and only include the long-term support versions, because I want to save on typing:
* Dapper Drake
* Hardy Heron
* Lucid Lynx
* Precise Pangolin
* Trusty Tahr
* Xenial Xerus
That's also six versions you have to update every time a security fix comes in. (Potentially) 6 times the code to create the fix, definitely 6 times the QA time, etc. All the same problems Microsoft has, but this time in your open source dreamland.
That's a huge, huge, waste of effort that could go towards actually making the OS better.
> we don't want another "XP situation" with Windows 7
If Microsoft had really wanted to avoid that, they'd have made Windows 10 actually attractive to the end user and the tech people that would recommend it to the end user. Instead they jammed it chock-full of spyware and malware-tier garbage that nobody wants, and treat the installbase as a testbed for forced updates that could easily (and have) render machines inoperable.
Windows 7 will become the next XP, and Microsoft has nobody to blame for it but themselves.
End users and tech people always knee-jerk about anything that changes, whether it's a positive change or not.
The Ribbon interface they introduced in Office back in 2007 was a huge improvement over the mess of dialogs, toolbars and menus they had before by every metric. People still bitch about it, almost a decade later. The people who bitch about it benefit as much as everybody else from the increased usability, but that doesn't stop the bitching.
And it's not just Microsoft. People bitched at Firefox when they moved the menu into the tabs. People bitched at Chrome when it removed "http" from the URL bar (I just noticed it seems to have come back at some point), people bitch about everything all the time. Not because they genuinely didn't like it, or because it makes their life more difficult, but because they simply hate change.
The only way to keep these people happy is to change nothing, ever. Is that really what you want? It's not what I want.
Not sure I agree. Sure, there's lot of change-bitching (like people complaining about Facebook timelines), and every change breaks someone's workflow (https://xkcd.com/1172/), but quite a lot of those changes people complain about are really making the applications worse.
You brought up Office's ribbon. Sure, it was a "look&feel benefit", but it also significantly hurt discoverability and reduced the number of features available. Nowadays I can't find the more advanced stuff I know that worked in Excel and Word in the past. Is it just a discoverability problem, or did Microsoft go with that stupid new trend of dumbing down software to the lowest common denominator? I don't know, but the interface doesn't allow me to find out.
People bitched at Chrome because removing "http" was seen as a first step of removing the address bar altogether, dumbing down both the browser and peoples' perception of the Internet. The less you demand from your users, the dumber they get. Sure, it may be good for the quarterly sales report, but it's disastrous for the future of technology.
> You brought up Office's ribbon. Sure, it was a "look&feel benefit", but it also significantly hurt discoverability
That is simply not true.
In fact, the major impetus for creating the Ribbon was the Office team dealing with the constant feature requests for features they'd already implemented, but users couldn't find how to activate/use.
> and reduced the number of features available.
Also untrue, unless you're going to say things like "being able to drag a menu off the menu bar and hover around like a toolbar" are a "feature".
Or put another way, it did reduce configurability, but the number of actual useful features was not reduced.
> Is it just a discoverability problem, or did Microsoft go with that stupid new trend of dumbing down software to the lowest common denominator?
You should know I mentally translate the phrase "dumb down" to, "I don't like this because of a knee-jerk but I've never bothered to think about it long enough to express why".
> The less you demand from your users, the dumber they get.
Seriously?
How about: the fewer obstacles you put in front of your users, the more useful work they can get done.
> Sure, it was a "look&feel benefit", but it also significantly hurt discoverability and reduced the number of features available.
I think that the ribbon design itself actually helped discoverability, at the expense of familiarity for long-term users of the old interface (OTOH, I think that simultaneously with the introduction of the ribbon, they also made it so a lot of options that previously were on the UI required customization to actually have them surfaced at all -- which they also, IIRC, did in some previous versions without changing the UI structure -- and, IIRC again, they reversed some of the most egregious of those in 2010.)
You should watch the talk[1] by Joe Peacock of fark.com about updating the site (the infamous "You'll get over it" incident).
The solution isn't "change nothing". Instead, you involve the people that use the old (current) version in the process, keep them informed, and get some kind of buy-in. Most importantly, you respect that the user has their own schedule and needs with a migration path that allows the user to make the transition at their own pace.
What you don't do is surprise users at random times, revoke any agency they had, and force changes on them without any consideration fo the user's situation.
My thought as well. If you have sneak in and force your users to upgrade, your doing something wrong.
And everyone frames this upgrade tactic like it's good for the user. In reality, this is good for MS, and it happens to have some benefits for the user. Lets quit acting like MS is being altruistic here.
> Instead they jammed it chock-full of spyware and malware-tier garbage that nobody wants
Can people stop spreading this meme? Worst case, anonymized telemetry is hardly spyware.
> Windows 10 actually attractive to the end user
It is, regular people around me love it.
> and the tech people that would recommend it to the end user.
I (and many) do, if only because it is immensely better than sticking to Win7 whose non-extended support ends next year or something.
> Microsoft has nobody to blame for it but themselves
MS made a couple missteps, but people just love to blow whatever MS does way out of proportion (the same way they do for Apple, only for other points) so instead of having reasonable discourse, all we have is a pile of knee-jerk reactions (not even flamewars!)
We get it, MS is bad, Apple is bad, Google is bad bad bad. Oh nasty corps. Probably end user should stick to pen+paper.
EDIT: not even a dozen seconds and downvotes are pouring in. Is it still possible to have some reasonable talk instead of yelling at each other?
How about stopping the meme that everyone should accept spyware?
> anonymized telemetry is hardly spyware
Without the explicit informed consent - which means opt-IN and an accurate and full manifest of what is included - then "telemetry" is spyware, by definition.
As for making the data "anonymous", have you seen the specifics of how that works? When Google claimed they made the IP addresses in GA anonymous they only masked the lowest 8-bits. Uniqueness (and the ASN) was completely recoverable.
The only way to make "telemetry" anonymous is to cook it so much that it isn't useful anymore. If you doubt this, you don't understand how easily modern methods can find correlations between data sets. But that's only about the data inside the packet. Just logging arrival times of packets that have any kind of common identifier can build a detailed picture of someone's pattern-of-life. Just because think it's ok to spy on users doesn't mean you get to make that decision for everybody else.
> regular people around me love it.
So what? It's a fallacy to extrapolate that opinion onto other people.
> support ends next year
Which means support is still available.
> Oh nasty corps.
Willfully misrepresenting the people that criticize Microsoft (et al) is never a good way to argue.
> Probably end user should stick to pen+paper.
Insults like this are why you got downvoted.
> reasonable talk instead of yelling at each other?
>MS made a couple missteps, but people just love to blow whatever MS does way out of proportion (the same way they do for Apple, only for other points) so instead of having reasonable discourse, all we have is a pile of knee-jerk reactions (not even flamewars!)
>We get it, MS is bad, Apple is bad, Google is bad bad bad. Oh nasty corps. Probably end user should stick to pen+paper.
>EDIT: not even a dozen seconds and downvotes are pouring in. Is it still possible to have some reasonable talk instead of yelling at each other?
Haha yeah I wonder why people have a problem with your comment?!???!?!?!?!? You're just so reasonable here!
The downvotes are pouring because you suggested that telemetry shipped by Microsoft being spyware is a "meme". This is seen as both arrogant and wrong at the same time - the best combination to collect downvotes.
(I didn't downvote you but I think you are very wrong).
Isn't it true that originally Win10 previews logged a lot of things, but M$ pretty much stopped doing most of that with the release versions of Windows 10? I.e. people seem to be criticizing present Windows 10 by what it was before it was officially recommended for general population.
And I could keep fixing my 92 Toyota Corolla to keep it on the road, but at some point it becomes more effective to just move on. There are some things inherent in older software that go beyond a simple patch, design decisions that may have made sense at the time but don't today. The only real way to go about that is how Apple does it, releasing a huge service pack that makes pretty major changes to the OS. And at that point, it's hardly any different than the changes Microsoft makes in different versions of Windows, except for the GUI.
Toyota doesn't get to come to your house and tow your Corolla away when they think you ought to move on. You get to decide that: it's your car, and it's your choice.
If Toyota feels so embarrassed by the fact that you are driving your Corolla that they want to spend some money trying to convince you to replace it, they can certainly make you a trade-in offer. But maybe you like your Corolla, or you don't feel like dealing with all the paperwork; for whatever reason, you decline the offer. Does Toyota get to come haul your car away and give you a new one regardless? Hell fucking no. It's your car.
If Microsoft wants people to stop using XP they have every right to try to tempt those XP users with a better offer, but some people just won't want to, and that is their right. Their computer, their choice.
Toyota doesn't have to keep paying for your maintenance, whereas MS does keep having to pay for their time to develop patches for XP.
A better :caranalogy: would be whether, as emissions standards come in, you lose the ability to drive your old car unless you upgrade it. Except even then, Toyota doesn't pay for the new ECU instead of your carburetor, but you expect MS to keep maintaining an outdated seucrity model.
Moreover, if you don't upgrade it you DO get forced off the roads, namely by legislation prohibiting its registration.
> Toyota doesn't get to come to your house and tow your Corolla away when they think you ought to move on. You get to decide that: it's your car, and it's your choice.
Depends on where you live. In Germany TÜV has to regularly check your car for complying with street regulations, and if it doesn't pass, you don't get to drive it.
The only way to keep it is to keep it of the roads, and there's a nice :caranalogy: to keeping your insecure-via-age OS by keeping it offline.
That might well be a reasonable way to regulate the use of computing machines. I am not rejecting the idea of collective responsiblity! But Microsoft cannot grant themselves such governmental powers just by wishing to have them. If such a collective decision about safety and liability were to arise, it would have to be established democratically.
There's actually precedent for that in the world of cars. The GM EV1 was leased out and later 100% recalled and destroyed. Under the license agreement with GM, they did have the ability to take away your car, much for the same reason Microsoft pushes OS upgrades: their inability or unwillingness to support the platform any further.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1#Program_can...
At some point Microsoft has to make breaking changes to Windows XP. Simple service packs won't suffice. Airbags, three point seatbelts, electronic fuel injection, variable valve timing, these are all modern conveniences that people expect in a car these days. Things that are very hard to retrofit into an old car without redesigning the platform at a core level. Sure, a 2016 and a 1992 model are still Corollas but it's hard to argue that Toyota should still be selling the 1992 model retrofitted to include all of our modern needs.
The argument here is "Microsoft should still be patching Windows XP." Should Toyota keep retrofitting modern safety features into their old car?
Except I didn't lease Windows 7 for a limited time, I licensed it for use without a time limit. If GM hadn't disclosed that the EV1 transaction was actually a lease -- meaning if they had gone into peoples' garages and towed 'their' EV1s away at a time of GM's choosing -- there would have been serious legal consequences. As there should be here.
You'll probably respond by saying that Microsoft is only doing what I authorized them to do on page 34, paragraph 8(c) of the EULA. At which point the only response I can offer is, "Fool me once, shame on me."
Sure, if I've leased the car from Toyota, maybe the terms of the lease obligate me to bring it in for service, and allow them to replace its carburetor with a fuel injector, fit it out with ABS, or whatever else. Depends on the lease, I suppose. Who owns the car, in this case? Not me, clearly.
I'm not arguing that Microsoft should be selling 1992 Corollas retrofitted with 2016-tech-level features; I'm arguing that it's the owner of the '92 Corolla who gets to decide whether, when, and how it should be upgraded or replaced. Toyota doesn't get to make that choice just because they manufactured the car; the owner of the car gets to make that choice. That's what ownership means.
If I own the computer, I get to decide what software I'm going to install on it, and that means I get to decide whether, when, and how to update it. Neither Microsoft nor any other OS maker gets to make that decision, because they do not own the computer in question.
But I can fix problems with a '92 Corolla. If Microsoft were to open source XP or Windows 7, perhaps the community would relieve Microsoft of the maintenance burden.
They are patching most of Windows XP as we speak. And not just for customers in the special extended support program. They are pacthing POSReady 2009 until 09/04/2019, and that's really a streamlined XP Pro with very slight differences, as most (not all) of the patches in POSReady won't cause any problems in a regular XP installation and it has "XP Professional" strings everywhere.
They simply decided that it was time to end support for regular customers and moved on.
They also removed most of the XP patches in the Microsoft Download Center a few months ago. I don't understand why they had all of them there for two years after support ended and suddenly they were gone without notice. Microsoft used to be more friendly, at least you could get their old files from ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/. Not anymore. BTW, this helped in my decision to start migration from their ecosystem after 20 years of Registry tweaking.
Everything Microsoft's doing with Windows 10 is already following Apple's example. Requiring an online account to log into the OS, offering free OS updates with extreme nagging. Integrating an ad-supported software store into the OS. That's all stuff Apple had done way before Microsoft.
People just don't bitch about Apple because Apple is "cool" and Microsoft is "lame". I guess.
And Apple's raking-in of massive amounts of $$$ shows that it's exactly what people want. So it should be absolutely no surprise that Microsoft's following their lead.
The "XP situation" happened because Win7 sucked. You do not get to release an awful, backwards "update" to your software and then expect that people pay you for it on the grounds that you also can't be bothered to keep updating the old, good version.
We have lost sight of the fact that software, operating systems included, is supposed to serve the consumer. Users choose to upgrade because there is a better version available. Developers demanding that users upgrade because, well, gosh, that's just what you do, is backwards.
Microsoft's decision to not charge for the Win10 update was a step in the right direction, which they promptly reversed by nagging and abrupt, involuntary updates.
The "XP situation" was not because Win7 sucked. Win7 has always been considered a successful and better upgrade to WinXP. I think you are thinking of Vista.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say that's Apple's approach. One of my MacBooks is running Yosemite and has been receiving security updates. My other Macbook is running El Capitan, and I hear Sierra is coming out soon. Those seem to be named updates. Maybe they've announced something new for Sierra?
And yet Windows 7 is supposed to keep getting security updates until 2020. Computer illiterate users are the last group you should upgrade to a new system in an automated manner, because they are the most helpless if drivers/applications break from it.
This is why the Windows 10 installer does a compatibility check before performing the upgrade. My friend was trying to upgrade to Windows 10 last week but it kept denying him saying his "display is not compatible". I logged into his machine and saw he had an old GoToMyPC monitor driver installed that was causing him grief, uninstalled it and away the upgrade went.
It's not perfect by any means, and "compatibility" checks often never will be, but I think it does a good enough job to prevent breaking a working system that isn't ready for the upgrade yet.
> This is why the Windows 10 installer does a compatibility check before performing the upgrade.
Which would be nice, if it worked 100%. But it doesn't, so that's a problem for non-technical users. In fact, the Win10 upgrade on my Win 8.1 laptop "helpfully" rolled-back the touchpad driver from the latest driver designed for Win 8.1 -- which works fine with Win 10 -- to the original Win 8 driver, which doesn't function at all under Win 10. Now, I'm not non-technical user, and it was straightforward for me to hunt down the installed version of the touchpad driver, realize the problem, go to the manufacturer's website and download the latest Win 8.1 version, install it, and go on with life. And I had an external BT mouse which didn't have a driver problem to use while I was doing that, and enough proficiency that I could have probably done what I needed to do with the keyboard anyway. But, had I been a nontechnical user...
Exactly, I have two notebooks on which Windows 10 Update claimed "everything's OK" and one is completely unusable under Windows 10 because the WiFi card driver is unsupported by Intel and crashes the whole system, and another is unusable because the touchpad doesn't work anymore.
On the former, even rolling back to Windows 7 turned bad, as all tasks (created by Microsoft, not by me) became somehow invalid.
I had this exact problem as well. I had to download the old version of the driver just to uninstall it and then I installed the latest Windows 10 driver. Problem solved. But it was the one thing that went wrong with it.
That's great for systems which are simply too old to handle the upgrade, but Windows has an ugly history of releasing upgrades which are uncaught breaking changes for some machines.
I think release-day Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and 10 all broke wifi connectivity for a large swath of users. At least one Windows 7 patch bricked a large number of Asus motherboards, and the Windows 10 upgrade did the same to a smaller number of Asus machines.
The usual story is that rapid adoption of Windows upgrades is basically volunteering your machine as a guinea pig, to the point that a lot of people won't adopt a new version until after Service Pack 1. Compatibility checks don't really stand in the way of pushing broken upgrades on people who can't fix them...
I seem to recall similar issues for OSX users wrt wifi, and also smb/cifs support. Nothing is seamless for everyone, as it's impossible to test every system... The fact that Apple doesn't get it right on their very limited range of internal hardware is a testament to that fact.
I'm actually stunned by Apple's wifi connectivity issues.
I don't know of OS X breaking updates as acute and widespread as Windows, but the space of Apple machines to test is small and predictable, where Microsoft faces an essentially impossible testing task.
Beyond that, though, Apple laptops seem to just have shitty wifi connectivity. At a guess, it's one of the downsides of metal unibody design (along with godawful native speakers), but it seems almost universal. Things have improved, but strength, speed, and range never seem competitive with non-Apple machines at a similar price point (or half that price point).
Fortunately, I tend to lag for months usually before updating major osx versions (I don't use my personal laptop much, and at work it's farther behind still), so didn't experience the wifi issue, but did with the cifs/smb change away from samba.
I haven't had connectivity issues, other than it takes a while to switch networks... At home, my macbook has about the best connections of any of my hardware, though my Nexus 6P may be better. I've been able to reliably copy files at 200Mbps+ over wifi. Worth noting I've got fewer than a dozen devices on wifi, and neighboring signals aren't that bad where I live.
Is a 51% success rate really good enough to justify unleashing the OS upgrade right now? Why not make the upgrade opt-in, continue improving the migration wizard over the next years, and start the upgrade campaign in two or three years when it becomes both stable and more pressing to migrate people over?
It would be less of an issue if more vendors submitted drivers to Windows Update. As much as I am "happy" with my cheap TP-Link 802.11ac NIC (I use a lot of TP-Link gear in my house, my TG1600-24TS switch is great for the price too) I literally cannot reinstall Windows without having the driver disk at hand or plugging in my powerline network adapter to download the drivers from their website. A lot of these issues could be mitigated by this alone, as the first thing that the Windows installer does (if you are upgrading from a running system) is check windows update for updates to the installer and compatible device drivers.
I agree that maybe they shouldn't be so persistent on trying to get people to upgrade this early, especially if you have a NIC that isn't supported out of the box or has a driver that isn't on Windows Update (because I know the first thing I do when unboxing new hardware is throw the damned CD away, the only thing I use the DVD drive in my PC for is ripping movies).
This is why the Windows 10 installer does a compatibility check before performing the upgrade
It fails. My father was forced to buy a new scanner (Canon I believe, one with an inlay for scanning photo-negatives) and a new soundcard (Xonar DX) because of lack of support. The soundcard itself still worked though, but none of the supporting tools (equalizer, multichannel processor, softvol control).
And? I said the Windows 10 installer makes efforts to avoid breaking working systems and does a decent job at it, Windows 10's confusing tablet-mode switching is a different issue entirely (my wife turned it on by accident on her Surface Pro just the other day and couldn't figure out what she did).
I installed Windows 10, and then discovered that the third-party driver that I needed for work was not compatible. Namely, the Roland REAC Driver.
That driver acts as a network protocol that you attach to a particular network adapter, so when I upgraded, the adapter showed up as having no protocols. Totally Roland’s fault, waiting until the final release of Windows 10 before even starting to work on upgrading their drivers, but Microsoft also gets some blame for thinking that only Microsoft network protocols matter.
The rollback worked, so no lasting harm that I’ve noticed, yet.
> I installed Windows 10, and then discovered that the third-party driver that I needed for work was not compatible
Similar. I KNOW that my wifi adapter's driver is not compatible with Windows 10. So were I to upgrade, I'd have no Wifi until I buy a new adapter, which I don't want to do for that machine. So the constant harassment to upgrade is frustrating.
It does a compatibility check, then upgrades anyway. I rely on a VNC client that Microsoft decided won't work in W10. Microsoft helpfully uninstalled the VNC client.
After W10 started, it did tell me what it had done. I was able to just reinstall the exact same client it removed and it works fine.
But this only supports creshal's point about computer illiterate users. If you hadn't been there to help, would your friend have been able to resolve this on his own?
My friend wasn't illiterate, this was more a UX problem of the installer (your display isn't compatible). He had gone and cleaned his system of all but the essentials and had uninstalled GoToMyPC months ago, he just couldn't figure out WTF the installer was talking about (he assumed it had something to do with his video card, a R9 290, which he made certain he was using the most recent drivers for - and our entire group of friends uses the same card and upgraded with no issues). If the installer just clearly stated that the "GoToMyPC Display Adapter" wasn't compatible he would have quickly whipped open device manager and removed it - hell, it even took me about 10 minutes to figure out WTF it was talking about and I am the go-to guy for fixing PC problems.
Honestly, that is a lot of the problems with the Windows 10 upgrade experience, poor UX (something which Microsoft has rarely been known for during install/upgrade time). I have never seen a machine just randomly upgrade itself to Windows 10, but the way Microsoft presents the damned pop up has a big blue "Yes, please!" button that most people are just going to click to make it go away - then come back shocked that their system "upgraded itself". It's entirely anecdotal, but there is 6 computers I manage for myself and my family, out of the 4 that don't live in my house (some random Dell AIO, a Lenovo Yoga, Lenovo IdeaPad S405, Dell XPS tower) between the time I last worked on them and the next they had been upgraded to Windows 10 without any issue and without any complaint. To be fair, they were all running Windows 8.1 already, so there wasn't a bunch of shocking UX changes outside of Cortana.
All of these systems were owned illiterate users, my grandmother, mother and aunt. To be fair, there wasn't any odd hardware configurations, but nonetheless I was shocked that these systems were upgraded without me even getting asked in "why does this look different" questions.
Those technically illiterate users are going to have trouble with Windows 10. My stepfather is in his 70s, and I had to help him set up the weather app - and it took me about ten minutes how to figure out how to set a default location!
10 is different enough from 7 that they're going to have to learn a lot of new habits - and while that's just the nature of modern life, some people are going to suffer significantly more than others.
I believe there must be a better way of getting the less-literate people to consensually upgrade to Windows 10, without forcing it on them.
Have you tried ChromeOS? My grandfather is in his mid 80's.
I've been helping him with his computer(s) for years. In the last year, I switched him over to a Chromebook, after trying and failing to switch him to Windows 10 (wasn't compatible with his old computer)... and since everything he does involves websites and bookmarks anyways.
It's the easiest time he's ever had using a computer. No random update notifications, adware popups, anti-virus subscription nags, etc. Nothing but a browser, which he knows how to use.
I'd recommend it to anyone considered technically illiterate.
I own a Chromebook, and it is my favorite machine to use out of all of the laptops I own. If I need Windows for something, i just Remote Desktop into my desktop downstairs.
My Chromebook is set up with Crouton, so I have a full linux environment on it for development.
Storage was an issue, but I swapped the original ssd out for a 256GB ssd. Now, it is pretty much a cheap ultrabook.
I mean it covers 99% of what most people do with their computers, and in a simple, lovely way. Word? Check. Excel? Check. Photos? Check. And, most importantly, browser, check.
I believe there must be a way of allowing people to live forever without growing old or dying. Unfortunately, neither of our beliefs are very helpful since we cannot describe an exact method for achieving our goals.
It's free if you only consider the cost of licensing the software to the end user.
It's not free if you consider that there is a value to the user's time spent dealing with the upgrade, dealing with consequences like drivers or programs that no longer work ( and in the case of OP), rolling back to the previous OS.
For me, "free" or not, this is the biggest cost: the daunting prospect of investing an unknowable number of hours of my time.
Apple manages to get rapid uptake of their new OSes without resorting to these shenanigans. But apparently making an OS that people want to upgrade was too difficult for Microsoft.
I mean, not too much changes with apple upgrades. Sure, someone in the know can pick out generations, but I (and most people) sure can't. Win10 is a drastic change.
It would be better if Microsoft hadn't stripped features out of 10 in order to ship it. For example, I use Windows Media Center in Windows 8. If I upgrade to Windows 10 it'll disappear and suddenly I won't be able to watch TV any more.
CABLECard is dead and until the FCC gets sabers rattling against the cable conglomerates for cable box reform (again) and (presumably) universal cable apps, it's tough for anyone to support TV on the computer. (Yeah, that leaves broadcast and broadcast is still open, but broadcast alone has never been a priority for Microsoft and there are still vendor/OEM apps that work with broadcast tuners in Windows 10, at least.)
The apps that Media Center was split into are getting better in Windows 10 and with the Anniversary Update and the Xbox One in mind are getting better support for running on couch screens again, but TV viewing is something that currently seems like it will take a while to sort out thanks to the cable conglomerate stubbornness and also the Xbox One needing to pivot and meet gaming stubbornness first over the fight to rebuild a modern Media Center (aka "OneGuide" now).
^ This. It's not THAT there is telemetry and "phoning home," it's the fact that Microsoft flat out REFUSES to be up front about what it's sending home, how they're anonymizing it, and why these things can't be 100% disabled. If you say nothing then your users will (and should) assume the worst.
Where have they refused to be up front about any of this? As far as I'm aware, they have detailed all of those things except how exactly they anonymize the data, which I haven't seen anyone specifically ask them about.
There's no way to turn it off. It says it's turned off, and it's still sending shit to Redmond. That's unacceptable and deceptive. I do not use software that lies to me, period, paragraph.
You can turn it off via group policy if you have windows enterprise. If you just want to complain that the cheaper version doesn't have the feature you want, and you don't want to pay the higher price for the version that does have it, that's your right, but I don't have much sympathy for that.
It's also worth noting that it doesn't seem to be possible to buy Enterprise as a regular user, so it's not even a matter of me not wanting to spend the money as it's a matter of the company not giving me the option.
You can disable utcsvc and prevent it from being re-enabled. Since doing so also disables Windows updates (which is why you shouldn't do it) you can also be sure that future updates will not re-enable it.
You have to pay to have the option to not be spied on, because only the version designed to be used for serious business supports disabling the first-party tracking, because business users are important and home users are just another revenue channel.
I now have even less moral issue with not paying to use Windows for personal use. Seriously, they should have just made it free for home users regardless of Win7 license state (I've had terrible luck with "upgraded" versions of Windows -- clean installs only for me, and yes I know about the Insider program and the exception to this...I didn't stay up on the news and I missed the "must be installed by" deadline).
If it makes you feel better, my mother was on an insider build because we figured she would get Windows either free or at a discount, and she ended up having to buy retail anyway.
This point fails thrice:
- I am paying for Windows already, that we've established does spy on me
- The Enterprise edition is not available to be purchased by a regular consumer anywhere I can locate
- The Enterprise edition doesn't allow the disabling of ALL reporting to Redmond, only most, and only via group policy which is hardly accessible to the layman.
Your first point still makes no sense to me. You are paying for something that doesn't have a feature you like. A more expensive version does have the feature. What are you proposing instead? That you get a product with more features for the same price? Of course every buyer wants that for every product. And every seller wants the opposite.
Your second point is equally mystifying, since you've created an arbitrary definition of a "regular consumer" as someone who doesn't want to contact the sales office of the company you want to buy a product from.
Your third point is factually wrong and/or is based on a ridiculous definition of reporting. See sibling comments.
Exactly where you would expect to find it: the data use and access section of the technet article on the feature, and in the Windows privacy statement.
Moreover, security researchers looking to make a name for themselves are crawling all over Windows. If they haven't found anything in the telemetry that makes headlines yet, most likely there's nothing to find.
Paranoid or not, telemetry is already everywhere without you knowing what's being sent and it's here to stay. Singling out Windows is ridiculous.
> I take it that you don't use a smartphone, either, since you have no way of knowing what is transmitted either, either by the primary OS or the secondary radio OS.
You know, two wrongs do not make one right.
> Or macOS (nee OS X), since Apple gathers telemetry as well.
In OSX, sending telemetry and crash reports is voluntary. It is being asked in the OOB wizard and is easily available in the Settings application.
In consumer SKUs of Windows 10, that's not the case, sending telemetry is mandatory.
> Paranoid or not, telemetry is already everywhere without you knowing what's being sent and it's here to stay.
Too early to say. It may also break Microsoft's neck.
> Singling out Windows is ridiculous.
Biggest target. They have a great opportunity to lead by example - in the positive way.
That data, even at the "Basic" level, is enough to be used for 'bad things'. And since it's on someone else's computer you can't know who has access to it, so you can assume the worst.
>Singling out Windows is ridiculous.
Just Windows 10. Because it's the only mainstream desktop OS with forced telemetry and no opt-out option.
As a web dev I'm definitely in favor of keeping people updated. However, MS should never never never fucking never interrupt somebody to force an upgrade.
It's a "Good Thing" when it's done using open source software, not necessarily when it's done by a closed-source company with different priorities than your own.
Something very similar happened to me + my old father (not tech savy). My parents have carefully written down steps on how to accomplish various functions (seems very unnatural to me but that is the only way they get things done on PCs).
I went to his place yesterday and as part of the usual tech support, he said he couldn't open his email and was confused why. Turns out, his machine had upgraded to Windows 10. What was horrible was that Windows decided to be in tablet-only mode (completely unfamiliar to me since I left Windows after Win7.. the Metro UI sucks when forced on non-tablet users). His printer/scanner all went kaput. It really made the entire day crummy. I say shame on you Microsoft. I've got my father an iPad but it isn't a PC replacement. He refuses MacOs because of the stupid touchpad. It is sad.
ChromeOS. Easiest OS to use. It's just a browser. Does he have a real need for native applications? Can he get everything he needs accomplished inside a browser (Google Docs, email, etc)? How much of what he's doing now is in the browser anyways?
I switched my grandfather over to it this year and he loves it. No more notifications / nags for updates, adware, and such. All extraneous pain points from windows are stripped away.
Of course you can. You can also, I think, reverse trackpad scrolling on Windows.
However, I dislike the fact that on MacOs they call the setting "natural scrolling" and that they enable it by default for any trackpad you hook up.
Moreover, since the "Magic Mouse" is basically a mouse with a trackpad for a scrolling wheeel, they also enable reverse scrolling by default for any mouse.
Bought Surface Pro a while back. Happy. Charger broke one week after warranty expiry. Keyboard broke a little later. So only way to reboot is hard reset which takes about 15 seconds of holding power button and volume up button, twice, and doesn't always work first time. Pretty unhappy but just about workable.
With Windows 10 latest version I was unable to disable a particular update which fails every time. So Windows will reboot regularly, including waking from sleep to do so, and fail to install, leading to 30 seconds plus reboot time at best to get it to wake up. For a tablet.
Since bought a new laptop and installed Linux on it as my main operating system for the first time (dual booting) and am pretty happy so far. Updates no longer reboot the computer for the most part. Missing a few features (especially hibernate), but most things work as well or better than Windows so far.
It happened to a DJ at a club I was at about a month ago. Middle of his set, his Surface Pro decides it's a great time to restart and "upgrade" to Windows 10.
Somebody at Microsoft seriously needs to be fired for that "feature".
I'm friends with a dev I respect that recently took a job on the Skype team. Skype is completely broken everywhere, because the code is a nightmare and people are scared to make changes - any change will break something. Linux is probably just low priority on a very long list of things that are terrible/broken about Skype.
My parents media center pc did a forced upgrade despite the onboard graphics being unsupported. The result was an unusable output. After a few hours attempting to get the drivers to work until downgraded. Windows is still asking me to upgrade!
Because the upgrades add technical debt without removing many of the problems of the previous systems.
My non-tech relatives all agree that windows 2000, vista, and 7 are all the same. Why make them move to something else the same? Security - what is that, when this was working fine before? ME was a disaster we would all like to forget - where do you expect their confidence to come from, in win10, when the past hasn't inspired any?
This is probably a dangerous position as a software developer, but I think we should stop calling these things upgrades. What's being shipped are changes. Whether they're improvements or not is completely subjective.
It seems like splitting hairs, but terminology matters. It sounds harmless when you say "Microsoft reserves the right to update your machine" but things are clearer when you say "Microsoft reserves the right to change your machine, on their own schedule", which is effectively the right they've conferred on themselves.
Windows 10 (and patches) aren't upgrades, they're changes. They might be better for you, or they might be worse. Nobody should be bullied into changing their machines at a vendor's whims.
Yeah, it's like my bank "upgrading" me to a Gold account where I will be charged more fees and receive more calls from my bank trying to sell me products...
Windows 10 advertises Microsoft products, and 3rd party products, and is the first step into being suckered into Microsoft's foray into a paid subscription OS.
Sounds like a great metaphor. Let us "upgrade" you to make more money from you.
Because it glosses over the fact that upgrades to OSs have defined security benefits.
A better one would be to say that it's like your bank upgrading your card from signature to chip + pin and issuing a new card number as a result. It's a frustration to change all your automated billing, but they do it because it's more secure and costs them less in fraud protection.
Windows 10 isn't more secure. The browser runs with the same privileges than in Windows 7. People will get malware in the same way.
What Microsoft calls "more secure" is the fact that Windows Store apps, which are a micro-tiny-minority of apps a typical user will run on a Windows desktop, work in a similar fashion than iOS apps, with a very limited access to the system, and therefore much reduced risk of malware. But I do not believe a typical user will be more protected with Windows 10 than Windows 7. Except more code means potentially more attack surface.
Actually, that's a great example, glad you brought it up. That's not less secure, and very similar to this situation.
That technology is being hailed as "more secure" because it requires you to insert, and type your secret PIN, correct?
1. In many cases, you can still use it online, just as before, without insertion+PIN.
2. Most stores will still allow you to swipe it, just as before. Some retailers aren't even allowing insertion yet, even though the hardware is there.
3. Even IF everyone required you to insert and type your PIN, you are actually less secure because the little bit you "consented to" when "upgrading" to chip + pin says that card issuers are less liable for fraudulent charges and other problems. http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/understanding-EM...
And it's still not a perfect analogy, because chip+pin isn't going to force me to subscribe to a monthly or yearly fee to use my bank card in the future, like Windows 10 assuredly will. It also doesn't implement additional technology for my bank to spy on me and my activity.
So - who's really safer?
The problem is that product changes are being rolled in with/disguised as security updates. That should be wrong, and while I'm normally on the side of less mandates - this misleading behavior should be addressed by lawmakers.
I'm reminded of an article by David Pogue, who used to write the back page column in MacWorld back in the '90s. One issue, he introduced a lexicon of terms he invented that he felt the computer industry should adopt.
One of them was "corrupgrade", which was defined as something billed as an upgrade but was actually worse than the old version. It's still the only one of those terms I remember, just because it's so useful.
I think this is a legitimate distinction. Service packs are usually upgrades, as are pretty much all security patches. New versions are called that to contrast with 'updates', but calling something like release-day Windows 7 an "upgrade" is an affront to English.
"Upgrade" seems to get used when there's a major version change and "Update" when there are minor changes. Since Windows 10 is supposedly the last version of Windows, it should be nothing but "Updates" from here on out.
A Windows update broke Quickbooks for our entire org over the weekend. Happens more often than you would think. A few months back a Windows update broke Outlook for half our team.
I visited my parents last weekend. My dad says his laptop automatically updated to Windows 10 a month ago and since then he was unable to use the internet (so basically the machine). He was PO'ed. He was tricked into installing it because Microsoft changed the behavior of the upgrade prompt. You can choose "Upgrade now" or "Not now, upgrade later". "Not now, upgrade later" use to behave like and mean "Ask me again later" Microsoft changed it to mean and behave like "Yes. Upgrade me, just not now... force it later". My mother was and has been able to avoid the forced upgrade by always clicking the "X" to close the prompt window and avoiding the dark pattern behavior.
Except that clicking the "x" is the same as clicking "Not now". The current pop-up is basically a notification that the upgrade has been scheduled and will happen. There's some other, smaller text in the window that would let her unschedule the update.
Same here. My mother called me in tears because she was tricked into installing Windows 10 on her PC and she can no longer sync photos from her camera.
What I find surprising is that I see tech journalists reporting the issues, I see people complaining about these forced upgrades and the privacy invasion in windows 10 on forums or around me, but I do not see the press confronting Microsoft on any of this.
Has anyone seen any interview where Nadella is pressed with questions on why they think it's OK to treat customer this way? All the interviews I have seen of Microsoft executives have been by docile journalists who prefer to keep their good relationship with the company than ask tough questions.
I am frankly surprised that she's the first one who's tried taking Microsoft to court. I kind of anticipated that there would be a class action lawsuit after Microsoft made Windows 10 a "recommended" update--meaning anyone who had their Win 7 or 8 machines set to install recommended updated automatically would get updated without being made aware of it.
No matter what they do, the users would complain. By leaving the settings on recommended, the user said she wants free IT support from Microsoft. Microsoft, like any other IT dept. would, made the decision to upgrade to an OS which will work better for everyone.
Sadly, a small amount of users don't understand why they can't keep using the same $200 Dell from 1999 forever - just like many users can't understand why Microsoft can't and shouldn't support obsolete operating systems forever.
Not fair! She was using it fine. It suddenly failed, due to events completely independent of it being a $200 Dell or whatever. She wasn't installing new apps, and her old ones served her well. No, this debacle was entirely of Microsofts' creation.
I made the rounds to my relatives last year and upgraded everyone's 15+ year old PCs from "Windows" to "Lubuntu." It's like breathing fresh life into an old machine.
A huge chunk of users have no need for a new computer, or a new operating system for that matter. They want to have a web browser, e-mail and open documents. For some, that's meant switching over to using a tablet. But for others, they just want to keep using the machine they've got.
And it's not even really a Windows vs Linux thing. If Microsoft would continue to provide security updates for their old OSes or make a paired down version of their new OSes to work on a minimalist or older machine then I would have upgraded them to that instead.
With all the complaints about Windows 10, I haven't seen a demand for ongoing Microsoft support. I've seen a lot of people say that Microsoft can't and won't support previous versions of their OSes forever, and I don't think many people would have a problem with that.
The idea of "let's put a popup on everyone's computer telling them they can download the next version of Windows for free" simply reeks of malware shit. Even worse is when they decided to force it on everyone else who doesn't automatically click "OK" on every dialog box they see.
I kinda understand the mindset. In IT, we learn that pretty much everyone will be clueless on how to do something unless you make it nearly impossible for them to not. So when Microsoft's top support question was "how to I upgrade to Windows 10", it doesn't seem out of far field for them to think "how do we make it nearly impossible for them to fail".
There's no doubt Microsoft screwed this up for a number of reasons, including valid and important reasons some people need to stay on Windows 7. And had they not gotten into the whole telemetry mess, 90% of the people who didn't want the upgrade would've gone away.
Automatic, non-consensual updates would be fine, if the laptop were designed for it. Case in point, my Chromebook gets updates all the time, and the little arrow in the corner usually indicates I've got something and that I should restart. I have never, ever had a bad update across any of my Chromebooks. It is done in an elegant, non-intrusive way.
The problem here is that in Microsoft's push to get Windows 10 onto as many machines as it can, they seem to have greatly underestimated the number of computers whose age or hardware renders them partially or completely borked by updating to Windows 10. And they seem generally unrepentant to the fact that they've strong-armed people into downloading an update that destroys their computer.
I agree with you on the IT mindset, but there's a huge difference between getting users in a small company to run updates or whatever the IT need there is vs overriding settings on something someone actually owns.
My company's IT has accidentally done things like this before and even when it's on a corporate machine a popup coming up and saying "gonna restart in 5 to do updates" SUCKS while you're working.
Making it near impossible to fail to install != trickery.
Nearly impossible to fail installation, would be a pop-up asking yes/no. And making a short-cut on the desktop to start the same pop-up, and putting it in the start-menu.
Any support calls -> Start Menu -> Windows 10 Update. Click Yes. (Yes for some this could still be a problem :/ but these kind of people need help throughout the year anyway.)
Wanna bet that they extend the free offer "by popular demand" or come up with something similar?
Going from "free" to "paid" will guarantee no voluntary upgrades, period. Perhaps if W10 comes bundles with new hardware (just like all Windows versions before it), then - yes, W10 will seep through, but no way in hell anyone will ever explicitly pay Microsoft to upgrade to W10. So they will have absolutely nothing to lose by extending the free offer, so it's exactly what they will do.
You're giving them a lot of credit. Would anyone be surprised at this point if that was just the date where the malware evolves into ransomware? How easy it would be for MS to automatically "upgrade" people to Windows 10 but then lock them out of their system until they buy a verified key.
Microsoft's dishonest and manipulative tricks to force Windows 10 upgrades are terrible for regular users or people who just aren't ready to make the jump.
I have a non-techie friend who works in a veterinary clinic who recently texted me that the computers in her office had gone down after being forcibly upgraded to Windows 10. No computers meant having a hell of a time looking up records for the dogs and what medicine they were supposed to get.
Not only is this forced upgrade business unethical, it's potentially dangerous. Some Windows systems haven't been upgraded because they're too important to tinker with.
I was watching a stream of an online gaming tournament (Overwatch) with ~20k viewers. Right before a match one of the competitors machines decided to force a Windows 10 upgrade and they had to reschedule another two teams to play while he waited for everything to finish. It's to the point where Windows OS upgrades are no longer synonymous with new features or better performance, they are 100% associated with annoying and forced upgrade notifications.
IMO it invalidates all the awesome OSS work and public outreach Microsoft has been doing. If you gut punch me with your left hand I don't care if you're holding out flowers with your right.
Windows 10 was automatically installed. Well, partially. You can probably guess what happened; if this had happened to anyone else in the family, their computer would have been effectively bricked.
I used to spend most of my time in Linux anyway, but now I'm justifiably scared of booting Windows.
Windows 10 won't attempt to install unless it has enough space to complete, and they look for 16 GB.
So what I suspect actually occurred is that your hypervisor was set up to misreport how much space as available to Windows, so Windows 10 tried to install on the space it thought it had, only to hit the wall on the "real" filesystem below.
It is unlikely this ever would have occurred to anyone else in your family, unless they're running Windows in a hypervisor that misreports space.
This was not under a hypervisor, but it did happen as the same time as I was installing some large pieces of software; I'd just recently reinstalled, and was looking forward to playing X-COM 2.
The 3GB number is how much space was free after I excised the broken shards of the Windows 10 installer. So, sure, the space probably got taken up after the installer checked if there was enough, but it's not like I ever told it to start running.
One would think so, but then one would also think that nobody would ever design a boot recovery procedure such that it has an error case where it deletes all (several hundreds) executable files on the disk, completely hosing the system. But Microsoft still managed to do the latter. It's likely not that nobody thought about it, but maybe not the right person, and in big companies that can matter a lot.
They didn't seem to think of the possibility that I might have a long running, important process on a machine that I am not physically at. Restarting a machine just because I am not there to say no is bad.
Moving from XP to Windows 7 actually sped up a single core 32bit PC I have at home, but then the Win 10 installer filled up the hard drive, and consumed 50% CPU for months before I finally found a nice utility to completely remote it, and keep it gone. It was infuriating!!
I tried to update my wife's lil' tabletish Acer netbooky thing, because while I don't like the pushiness I did like Windows 10. And it's been pestering us with little popups for weeks at that point. I go to update it, and it says, Sorry, Windows is 64-bit only.
This is when I discover the machine that I purchased only about 2 years ago now was actually 32-bit. Didn't even know they were still making them at that time.
IIRC it bailed out in the first phase before downloading everything, but, still, couldn't the little popup check something as basic as bittedness?
Also IIRC it didn't stop bothering us until I went and did some registry hack or something to make it shut up, as it was just taunting us at that point. But I'm less confident about this aspect of my memory.
Windows 10 runs on 32-bit. The actual requirements are very confusing. And Intel still is making 32-bit processors for embedded systems.
I’m surprised that a 2-year-old machine doesn’t have the required CPU support. I just upgraded a 32-bit Core Duo system from 2007 to Windows 10.
I think the “easiest” way to check for compatibility is to look up that particular processor in the Intel ARK and check that it has the Execute Disable Bit.
But that doesn’t guarantee that it can run 64-bit Windows 10. Early-model 64-bit processors can’t run 64-bit Windows 10, because of missing locking primitives. Fortunately, that is a pretty small number of processors, most of them retired by now, because they were power-hungry and slow.
Heh. Whatever capability it is that would be required, this would be the netbook that didn't have it. It's not a high quality machine.
We/she keep buying cheapos for her... we're to the point now where I would have been better off buying a Real Machine up in the ~$400 price point instead, which would probably have outlasted any three of the cheapos by now. I really ought to have known better. Ah well, live and learn, learn, learn again.
Their practices for downloading updates in Windows 10 itself are not much better. I tried following all the instructions to disable automatic updates on my Windows 10 pro laptop and still they got me with 20 minutes update at the time I needed my computer urgently. Windows behaves like malware these days and it's very sad to see.
Why are you disabling updates in Windows 10? I meant you're already on it. Updates are the most valuable security defense (next to never using anti-virus as it's a massive attack vector).
Because I don't want to have something running full screen only to have the update window quietly popup in the background to auto-shutdown my system in 10 minutes.
Because I don't want to sit around for 10 minutes waiting for updates to install before I can pack up my laptop.
Because I don't want to arrive somewhere ready to work/play only to have an additional 10 minutes and 2 restarts tacked on to my boot time.
Because I don't want to have random lag spikes nor frame drops in games as my system decides that now is the perfect time to download an update.
Disabling automatic updates isn't stupid if you're willing to manage them in a sane manner.
I just don't want them to be automatic. I want to have control over time they are installed so I can, you know, have my computer available when it's needed and do maintenance when it's not needed.
Apparently Windows 10 randomly resets the update settings though so it's very hard to avoid surprises. This is just user hostile behavior in my book.
Since we're all sharing stories of family tech support - I recently had to give my sister's Toshiba laptop an overhaul, upgraded to Windows 10. That's it... no drama, no problems -sorry.
Didn't XP teach us all a lesson about locked in/legacy software and it's danger to the security and stability of modern computing? Why is it okay that my iOS and Android devices essentially require an update several times a year but not my PC OS?
> Why is it okay that my iOS and Android devices essentially require an update several times a year but not my PC OS?
In my case, two points come to mind, for me. First: My phone isn't as important as my PC. It's just a convenience. If the update ruins something, I can always re-flash to a clean image, and the phone'll automatically re-sync most of my stuff. Or I can grab the spare from the drawer. Or buy a cheap-o replacement for $50 or so. Second: My PC's set up to support almost 30 years worth of software and a couple different OSes, with some weird hardware configurations. It's a much more complex system. Several things will break during a major upgrade.
> Didn't XP teach us all a lesson about locked in/legacy software and it's danger to the security and stability of modern computing?
Sure. Stick it behind a firewall and don't go questionable places online. Reboot to Linux if you really feel like you need to ;-) My Windows XP machines work just fine, thank you very much!
You're the minority. I don't know a single person outside of tech, or maybe the "office" world that would consider their PC more important than their phone.
"Stick it behind a firewall and don't go questionable places online."
This is a joke right? My Mom's XP is used for browsing mainstream news sites, weather etc. and her PC was thoroughly polluted despite having an active AV/firewall etc. Infections aren't only a problem for those that use BT.
I understand that my opinion is in the minority. Maybe I should rephrase it that the actual instances of data on the phone aren't as important. Cloud backup is ubiquitous, easy to use, and gratis from multiple vendors. Pictures, Videos, texts, contacts, etc all either get backed up, or weren't stored on the phone in the first place. With Apple phones especially, it's simple for average users to take a backup image of the phone.
>This is a joke right?
No, it's reflective of my personal experience. I haven't had an infection on an XP machine since about 2005. I have no idea what the heck other people are doing to get into so much trouble. Either I'm doing something magically right, or I've had insane levels of luck. My netbook's on at home, booted into XP right now because I forgot to put it to sleep before I left.
>Didn't XP teach us all a lesson about locked in/legacy software
I would agree with anyone claiming that this is a shitty argument: Users to some extend brought this upon themselves, because given the option people would stay on Windows XP or older.
All the people that are still on Windows XP, their user experience has just gotten better, no longer is Windows nagging them about updates and security fixes.
Microsoft is trying to transition people to rolling upgrades, because users suck at letting go of their old unsafe legacy software. They transitioning in a shitty manor, but I'm not sure they have much choice, other than turn their back to Windows 7 and 8 users.
I have co-workers that when they where upgraded to a later version of Windows on our terminal server wanted to know: Can't we just stay on Windows XP. This is people who try to sell consumers what ever happens to be the fashion this month. People that would like nothing better than customers that swap out everything in their home every six month. Everything except the operating system on the computer apparently.
Yes, Microsoft has made a shitty move, but on the other end of that spectrum is end users that would have you run Windows XP service pack 27.
"because given the option people would stay on Windows XP or older."
"Can't we just stay on Windows XP"
This is awesome because it highlights my point. Users, if given the choice will defer, defer, defer until it's too late. MS should be applauded for "saving users" from themselves.
> Why is it okay that my iOS and Android devices essentially require an update several times a year but not my PC OS?
Except, uh, they don't?
My tablet (ASUS P01MA/Z580CA) still runs Lollipop and works fine. My phone (Nexus 5X) pops up with an update every month, but there is no coercion to install it, and it doesn't install it without my approval.
Precisely. I refuse to update my phone (Sony Z3C) because based on feedback it performs worse in battery life, because Google strongarmed Sony to remove their superior battery optimisation logic (Stamina) and include Googles halfassed one (Doze).
So if I'm happy with current configuration, why change it?
So you're right, no one has a gun to your head but there is no "never" option and you're constantly nagged. Not to mention you're left out of the modern app ecosystem, which these devices are heavily dependent on for their function.
I know class action lawyers who work incredibly hard to defend the 'small people' and don't make that much. They take David vs Goliath cases. They went after a tobacco company, for example.
The lawsuits take a lot of work, they only get paid if they win, and they don't always win.
I'm sure there are class action lawyers who are in it for the money, but most lawyers who are in it for the money would go into corporate law, not class action.
While I don't doubt that there are lawyers who are very much in it for the small guy, I can count on one hand the number of class action lawsuits I've seen where the outcome for the small guys in question is anything more substantial than a coupon. That's assuming you consider 0 fingers as a valid count on one hand. (I don't doubt such cases exist, but I've never seen one).
Yeah I'm not saying the payouts are great. But let's say, pessimistically, that the lawyers took 80%; if they had done it pro bono, you'd get 5 coupons instead of 1. Better, but not by much.
A small payout could be due to greedy class action lawyers, but it could be due to the corporate lawyers successfully arguing damages down to nearly nothing (compared to the size of the class). The second one sounds more likely to me.
In the cases I've heard about, the corporate team had orders of magnitude more resources than the class action lawyers (think 3 lawyers working part time on the case vs. the corporation having an expert prepare for 2 years to appear once in court. I am not making this up.)
I'm biased though, the few class action lawyers I know are good guys, it's possible most aren't. I havn't looked at the field in general, and IANAL, so take that with generous salt.
I wonder if there's a term for the more general concept - rules are put in place to help/empower the individual/less powerful only to have the system corrupted by the powerful interests already in existence.
"Regulatory capture" is also an example of this idea but I think there's a larger pattern.
I was using Windows 7 for a variety of machines with various distros of Ubuntu for the rest when the Windows 10 push started happening. I fought the good fight for as long as I could, but Windows won. I had to switch my remaining Microsoft machines to Ubuntu and haven't looked back since. My wife's machine is the only Windows 7 thing left in the house. Seriously, it's time to dump Microsoft anyway. LibreOffice is top-shelf these days and Linux is only becoming more and more popular. I predict that the trends for Microsoft products will make an impressive downturn if they don't start showing their professional, enterprise, and enthusiast user-base some respect very soon.
Microsoft are trying to following Apple's approach in dealing with users.
But I think there is a bit of a difference here. Apple users opted in. They knew how Apple operates before they bought Apple products. The same cannot be said for long time Microsoft customers.
I was forced to "upgrade" my iPad 2 to iOS 9.2, because I forgot my pin to unlock it. There is no way to factory reset it without updating the OS.
I mean, I didn't have to update it, but then I wouldn't be able to use it. My iPad was held hostage, although I guess it was my fault for forgetting my pin, right?
Here's a list of regressions in iOS 9:
- My sideloaded copy of Flux no longer works
- The built-in feature, to change the display temperature, is not available on my iPad 2, and the Flux app no longer works.
- Can no longer change audio output in Music app, to select between different bluetooth devices
- Battery life is worse
- BitTorrent Sync can no longer access my photos or videos
- For each bug they fixed, new bugs were introduced. In OneNote with text selection, and in Safari.
Why does nobody talk about all of the regressions in each OS update?
And of course, I had to update iTunes. And then of course I could no longer use it for development without updating my MacBook and XCode!
I use my iPad to develop medical software with an enterprise license on a closed environment, and do not need or /want/ the latest version of XCode.
I only used this device because it was provided by work, but I did start to grow fond of it and began using it more and more as a laptop replacement. I knew better than to buy an iOS device, since I've been burned by Apple so many times. I'd be happy to give you a long list of the ways Apple has been just as bad as Microsoft, except, Apple has a nice velvet glove when they are evil, whereas Microsoft is clay footed giant.
I suppose they mean taking Apple's "We know what is good for you better than you do" approach. While Apple currently does not force OS upgrades, they do make a lot of decisions for their users without giving their users an opt-out or a way to roll back. This idea top-down, walled garden is pretty central to contemporary Apple.
Apple makes design choices that are very opinionated on how you should use software and internals are hard to see, but they don't make decisions for you.
They decided for me that my updated iphone 4s should never be able to be restored to factory condition and I would be forced to suffer terrible performance and battery life.
They decided for me that all my apps should auto-update. This incentivizes application developers putting their users on a constant upgrade treadmill (similar to apple). I guess there is so much amazing "Innovation" happening in every update that they decided that users absolutely must want every single update. This has caused developers to never consider a software feature-set as released or finished and free of bugs. They have taken this horrible mindset that only existed on the web and brought it to native apps.
Then there is the heavy handed approach of forcing you to update your entire OS just to run a developer IDE. Something previously _unheard_ of and frankly embarrassing from an engineering point of view.
Well folks, that's all the time we have for this segment today, tune in tomorrow for more.. :)
One obvious example is the fact that Apple does not allow you to install anything but the latest OS (and possibly one minor revision back) on an iOS device. OS upgrade kills your battery life or makes a critical third-party app stop working? Too bad, so sad, sucks to be you, there's no way to go back.
They don't force you to upgrade, but they artificially block the ability to go back.
Example:
Apple held my iPad 2 hostage until I stopped using iOS 8. I forgot my unlock pin (because I lent my iPad to someone else) and there is no way to factory reset it without also updating the OS.
So now Flux no longer works, and there is no way to adjust the gamma on this device, which means I no longer like reading on it before bed. And there are plenty of other regressions in iOS 9 as well. And they forced me to update my desktop just to interact with it.
SO, Apple very much forced me to update, if I wanted to keep using my device. There is no reason that updating iOS should be required to factory reset it.
Isn't that making a decision for you? "users will only ever need to install software from our central app store" is deciding for the user that they don't need to be able to run whatever software they want on their device. It's fine if, as a user, you decide you don't need that capability, but you are still having that decided for you.
Disclaimer: I don't know the current status of 3rd party app on iOS but my point still stands.
They decided that ios9 on 5S should stutter while scrolling throughout the OS. A smooth working device experience on 8 was broken by an update and 10 minutes later with no option to revert anymore.
Interesting it coincided with release of SE couple months later...
All vendors suck, they just all have their own incentive.
You are not "forced" to upgrade the OS on an iphone, you will just have a pop up window every day asking you if you want to upgrade now or tonight. You have a choice!
It certainly contains security updates, but also the opportunity to nag me a little more with apple music, icloud, apple pay, etc... But it's all for my own good!
I had a problem with this when the recent iOS 9.2 update was bricking iPad Pros. My iPad had downloaded the update but (having seen early reports of problems) I hadn't let it install.
So naturally, it started incessantly popping up reminders asking to install it, and if you hit "Later" it tells you to enter your passcode and automatically installs it later. There's a small bit of text below the PIN pad that you have to tap to skip it, and it'll come back and ask you again over and over. It is definitely Windows10-esque.
It keeps attempting to install despite the fact that Apple had pulled the release when they confirmed the bricking issue. As far as I can tell there is no way to stop it.
You can stop a previously downloaded update from actually being installed by deleting the downloaded data in the settings, but that's definitely not easily discoverable behavior.
Hm, I'd looked through Settings for a way to cancel but couldn't find it. Now that you mention deleting the data, I'm guessing this is under General > Storage & iCloud Usage > Manage Storage rather than somewhere related to updates?
If only we could divorce the security updates from the "new shiny" stuff.
There was a time when I'd look forward to OS upgrades with excitement to see what improvements there are - now I dread them because there's a real chance I'll lose functionality and be forced into some computer illiterate focus group's views on how I need to use my machine...
That's true, but still less annoying than when I walked up to my PC to find a brand new OS I didn't ask for. I really wish there was a viable alternative to windows for gaming because I don't want to reward unethical behavior.
Every one of the major console vendors is known for unethical behavior.
Microsoft goes without saying given the topic, Sony removes functionality post-sale and bullies people who talk about their security holes, Nintendo violates fair use on Youtube.
I see. I think I would be just as infuriated with Apple if they upgraded my OS behind my back. Walling off the app store doesn't imply they can install software without my consent.
Not sure why this is being downvoted. It is clear that MS has Apple (and Google) envy and is ramming Win10 down user's throats to get in on the marketing game and wants to run one single OS controlled by them.
This is one of many more to come. Forcing people to install your new OS without their consent is scum bag behavior. With Apple I'm given the option to upgrade to a new version of the OS. On Windows, they want to cram it down your throat and hope for the best. And I won't even get into all of the psychological ploys they use to try and trick users into upgrading to Windows 10.
I know a student whose computer restarted to upgrade to Windows 10 the day before a paper was due. Needless to say she wasn't very impressed, and will likely never buy a PC again.
As far as I'm concerned the worst aspect of Windows 10 are the forced updates for "unmetered" Internet connection users. As it happens, many of us have wired connections that we pay through the nose for, and as long as MS won't give me an option to control the download of potentially massive updates, I'll continue sticking to my current 8.1. If this is back-ported to 8.1, I'll wipe my last install of Windows and go full-time Linux. MS has no business Forcing me to download stuff that I end-up paying for. The same goes for telemetry that will also presumably consume some fraction of my paid-for bandwidth.
The metered/non-metered distinction is reasonable, and the behavior that results from it defensible, but the assumption that wired (Ethernet) LAN connections are unmetered is absolutely indefensible, for a number of reasons:
1) Wired WAN connections are, in fact, quite often quota-limited (perhaps with a generous cap, but still limited).
2) A Wired LAN connection may backed by a wireless WAN connection.
There's a registry hack for setting wired to metered but I agree, it needs to be fixed. Are you able to add feedback (or +1 mine) on the Feedback Center?
Fun fact: The web sucks a LOT less if you spoof IE6 in your user agent. Almost every evil that can be given to you will be spared. No pop-overs, no javascript lazy loaders, basically anything with a framework behind it will treat you like a human again. It's wonderful.
Windows forced upgrade can be avoided with Never10: https://www.grc.com/never10.htm Easily Control Automatic and Unwanted Windows 7 & 8.1 Upgrading to Windows 10
rem Compatibility update for upgrading Windows 7
wusa /uninstall /kb:2952664 /quiet /norestart
rem Update that enables you to upgrade from Windows 7 to a later version of Windows
wusa /uninstall /kb:2990214 /quiet /norestart
rem Update to Windows 7 SP1 for performance improvements
wusa /uninstall /kb:3021917 /quiet /norestart
rem Update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry
wusa /uninstall /kb:3022345 /quiet /norestart
rem Update installs Get Windows 10 app in Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 SP1
wusa /uninstall /kb:3035583 /quiet /norestart
rem Update that enables you to upgrade from Windows 8.1 to a later version of Windows
wusa /uninstall /kb:3044374 /quiet /norestart
rem Update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry
wusa /uninstall /kb:3068708 /quiet /norestart
rem Update that adds telemetry points to consent.exe in Windows 8.1 and Windows 7
wusa /uninstall /kb:3075249 /quiet /norestart
rem Update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry
wusa /uninstall /kb:3080149 /quiet /norestart
rem Updated capabilities to upgrade Windows 8.1 and Windows 7
wusa /uninstall /kb:3123862 /quiet /norestart
rem Updated Internet Explorer 11 capabilities to upgrade Windows 8.1 and Windows 7
wusa /uninstall /kb:3146449 /quiet /norestart
Ah, yes sorry. I've heard this advice given often for the "Windows 10 problem", but given to users who definitely would never bother/know to update manually.
A strong brand costs so much to build, is such a valuable asset, I can't think of any commercial motive that would come close to making up for trashing the brands of the company and product like this.
So I'm going to conjecture a non-commercial motive: maybe the US government has asked Microsoft to do this to assist with surveillance. No proof, of course, but it's the only scenario I can think of in which this would make sense. The truth will probably come out someday; I'll be interested in seeing whether I was right.
A spokesperson for the company told the Seattle Times that it denied any wrongdoing and had dropped the appeal to avoid the additional expense of further litigation.
Good that in this case [0], Microsoft didn't sue to kid's parents aside from suing him.
Pick the world you want to live in and go build it.
Opt-in: free but chaotic and insecure.
Opt-out: more uniform, but imperfect and still messy.
Forced updates: it works but in the same way tyranny does.
I'm ok with security updates being on by default (and truly important ones being more forceful), but the harder you push the more freedom you take away. Do you want to live in a world where someone takes your choice away because they think they know better?
I haven't found anyone using Windows X that thinks it's better than Windows XP. Windows 10 is better than Windows 8 but still worse than XP. My father-in-law was pleased that his Windows 8 was replaced by 10 automatically because he hated it and was about to return his laptop.
Microsoft was in the best possible position before Windows10
They could have been the peoples OS.
They could have said, 'we listened and this is Win10'
Win10 is almost great, forced updates, sketchy snooping and forced accounts sort of ruined it.
Good. I'm sure everyone here has a story about someone we know whose windows machine was upgraded. Say what you want about these kinds of court cases, but real emotional distress has been inflicted on so many people by MS by doing this.
I tried Windows 10, spent 18 hours tweaking and fine tuning until I went too far with disabling the hidden telemetry services (yes W10 has hidden services that you will never see in the MMC but run with an automatic trigger). Went afk which was apparently the trigger condition, two hours later I find my laptop completely locked and unresponsive burning the cpu in some infinite loop.
Have to give them credit tho, the telemetry that cannot be disabled does not bypass the software firewall in case you're blocking the ports, at least not from what I have learned in the span of two days.
This doesn't just affect upgrades from earlier versions of Windows to Windows 10. I've seen Windows 10 computers spontaneously become unusable for hours, saying "All your files are exactly where you left them." Real helpful.
I haven't personally used Windows in years, but I remember a completely unproductive day at work when we installed a Visual Studio upgrade that look approximately 24 hours to install (might have been 18, or maybe 36 -- I forget) with no option to cancel. At least that was a bug that Microsoft later admitted to and fixed.
If I called the shots at Microsoft I would handle things differently: run a series of advertisements warning people that after a certain date, no security updates would be available for old versions of Windows. I would then make it easy and free to update any computer, but I would not force automatic updates. I would explain to the public that for online security that everyone had to always be on the latest version.
This may sound harsh, but I think it would be for the most benefit for most people.
I was sitting on an exam where we were allowed (although not mandatory) to use a computer to research and write the exam and halfway through reading the exam sheets I noticed my colleague's computer restarts and enters the windows 10 installation mode. It finished half way through our exam time. His computer was useless to him for the exam.
I dont see mandatory updates as a bad thing per se. I think ideally it would be a way to allow users that wants to use older versions to pay a fee to do that (Basically to cover the maintenance service due to keep patching legacy versions). I think its understandable that MS dont want to keep investing in phased out software.
> I think its understandable that MS dont want to keep investing in phased out software.
I think the problem is that they are phasing out software to replace it with something that few people are asking for. I like Windows 10. I also liked Windows 8.1, 7, Vista, XP, and 2000. I've been using them to do basically the exact same thing for the past 15 years -- run software and manage files. I think any one of them could have been the operating system that Microsoft declares "this is the last one!".
I might be the only person who wants Windows 10 but can't get the install to work. I'm going to the MS Redmond campus on Wed to see if anyone there can figure it out.
time to get a certified copy of the case docs from that court house and visit the local one - sounds like it was a Small Claims, so not much hassle - at least comparing to the annoyance of those notifications and the final insult of the upgrade that still finally happened anyway.
They report every executable you run to check against a malware database. If you're using any software that isn't licensed or have cracks, those get reported too. This occurs even if you turn off all the reporting on the initial account setup.
Although I can't speak for Windows 10, in general it is best to upgrade to the newest MS OS because although older versions of Windows get security upgrades, the newest version generally has newer security features that the older versions do not have, some of it taking advantage of newer Intel hardware.
I currently run Mac with Windows 10 in Parallels VM.
> Her $10,000 figure reflected estimated lost compensation as well as the cost of a new system.
The article doesn't go into what she does for a living, so I'll leave the compensation part alone.
But why did she need to buy a new computer? Did Windows 10 flash her BIOS? Or is it just the standard "oh my computer is slow, better just buy a new one"?
Good job, Microsoft. Everyone who works on the Windows team should be proud. You've built something that you literally can't give away for free without force-feeding it to users, and that can be defended only by downmodding those who object.
Ugh... I missed my opportunity. I upgraded the OS on my iPhone 3G and the thing ran soooo slow after that. It was so slow that it was almost impossible to use it. I should have sued Apple!!!
That's BS. Advertising how awesome $vendor is with updating their own hardware but failing to note that it runs like crap, that user should do the research and isn't possible to revert, while nagging you with update notifications should result in a class action suit as well.
They stated iOS 9 would run on the 4S. It does, but quite painfully. They clearly knew this would happen as they have a very good understanding of the limitations of their own hardware.
You can downgrade an iPhone 3G. Firmware signing started with the 3GS (and IIRC, that one was cracked, only the iPhone 4 and later firmware signing works as intended)
There are many helpful things about Windows 10 - security, update, performance. Then there's the new screwed-up interface. If they'd staged these two, or offered them separately, there'd be less resistance.
Maybe the interface is a generational thing. I don't appreciate the phone-centric features (swipe, page-by-page, large boxy graphics everywhere) on a desktop. Tiles are obnoxious. The new browser is obnoxious (struggle to set and then maintain home page/blank page settings through updates). The goofy wizards with no obvious buttons.
What do you mean by "screwed-up interface"? After using 10 (upgraded from 7) for the last few months, I can only say that the interface is better. Any changes that I've noticed have been improvements, so I'm genuinely curious as to what you're referring to.
In my experience, Windows 10 is a poor upgrade from Windows 7 on laptops and desktops. The interface is a buggy, half-hearted attempt to roll back the trainwreck that is Windows 8 to something resembling 7, except 7 still works better since it doesn't have to deal with all the Metro (tablet/touch interface) bits.
For now I'm keeping Windows 7 with manual updates - while loathing the fact that I have to use Windows at all - and I suspect there are a lot of people like me.
except 7 still works better since it doesn't have to deal with all the Metro (tablet/touch interface) bits.
Honestly, What metro bits? If been using Windows 10 on my desktop since release and there are no metro bits that show up in my day to day use my computer. The only bits that where there in Windows 10 where the tiles in start menu, but they where easy to remove. Personally I consider Windows 10 a clear improvement over Windows 7 in just about every aspect.
The new shiny, touchy, metro-y Settings app, for one. Half the settings have moved there, while the rest of the stuff (generally the more advanced, non mobile-related kind) still lies in the "legacy" Control Panel.
One of the most embarrassing aberrations of trying to convert a powerful, productivity-oriented PC operating system into a mobile devices firmware.
Coming from Windows 7, and being completely baffled by 8.x, I feel 10 is an upgrade in most ways. A bit inconsistent in how apps draw/behave, but still an upgrade.
If I punched you in the face (Windows 8) the slapped you after (Windows 10), you'd find the slap quite an upgrade as well. It still doesn't mean it's pleasant (halfassed Settings).
I feel Windows 10 still has an inferior interface when compared to Ubuntu, when it comes to Virtual Desktops support and the CLI. Also, some minor details like volume control, Wi-Fi network selection and USB devices are noticeable superior in Ubuntu.
However, I like the tablet oriented interface, as I have a convertible laptop, and it makes for a truly fantastic comic reader.
A friend accepted the Windows 10 update but then his Asus laptop had some failed windows update and went into a reboot loop. Completely unable to boot. This was 6 months after Windows 10 was released.
So, we had to wait for it to install the OS, then decline the terms of service, then wait for it to roll-back to the previous OS. I'm using Windows 10 and enjoy it, but I'm still tempted to migrate to another OS just because of these practices.