Windows 10 forced upgrade

Went to my PC this morning to find Mr Microsoft had upgraded me to Windows 10. I never asked him to, and I keep clicking on 'no thanks' when he offered it. Despite this there it was. It took me a while to work out how to get back to W7, and then took the computer ages to do whatever it needed to. I still have to re-install my antivirus as that thinks I have gone to w10 and is complaining. Computer now sems to be running slower..

I've had enough bad experiences of stuff not working going from W95 to XP then to W7 to want to stay with W7 as long as I can. Can someone explain why Microsoft are so dead set on me changing? My nasty suspicious nature thinks there is some plan to get money out of me in the future. At the very least I should have been given warning so that I could back up all my files.

Edited By duncan webster on 17/05/2016 11:52:16

Duncan, I managed to avoid this free "upgrade", and have found a utility that can be had for free here that stops Win7 from downloading and running the updates. They want you to change because they want to stop supporting Win7 in terms of security patches etc at some point. (And there may be more nefarious reasons too.)

Duncan,

It's worth reading the last few posts on this previous thread.

The GWX tool appears to work very well [so far], but it really should not be necessary for us to defend ourselves against Micro$oft.

I remain disgusted

MichaelG.

Hi Duncan,

In the good old days Microsoft earned a very good living by selling software licenses. Not just for operating systems but also a wide range of development tools, Word Processors, Browsers, Spreadsheets, Databases, Games, and Web Servers etc. They also sell an excellent range of services in support of their software and how best it can be used by a business.

Microsoft's traditional income from licenses is drying up due to market changes. They lost the battle for Supercomputers and - much more seriously - that for the absolutely massive mobile market. Android is based on a Linux kernel.

Another way of making money from the web is to accurately target potential sources of income with advertising and other offers. Microsoft are interested in this market.

Accurate targeting is best achieved by tracking the activity of internet users. Their purchase history, contacts, and interests can all be recorded and analysed. There are many ways in which this information can be mined, for example to create and sell lists of potential customers to interested suppliers, or to identify market trends.

There are several examples of Microsoft moving into data collection and analysis. The Bing search engine collects usage data much as does Google. Windows 10 is free to customers but, unlike Windows 7, it "phones home" by default so that Microsoft can collect data about what you do with your computer. Most, but not all, of the "phone home" features can be turned off but the user has to realise first that this needs to be done and then has to wade through various settings to plug the leaks. These features are off by default in Windows 10 Professional but you pay a license fee for that.

Microsoft don't profit from people who stay on Windows 7 and there is new money to be made from Windows 10 and future upgrades.

I'm not bashing Microsoft. I benefit from two machines running Windows 10. I don't suggest that Microsoft are in any way wicked in all this, it is simply that my and Microsoft's best interests are not necessarily the same!

Not everyone is worried by privacy issues. I'm pleased, for example, that this forum carries advertising targeted at me even though I am thereby outed as a Model Engineer! But, after a career in big IT I am very aware of just how much can be deduced from a large data set and also that the deductions can be used for good or bad. The Inland Revenue detecting tax-dodging is good. Criminals selecting vulnerable old people to scam is not.

Cheers,

Dave

I'm not surprised that you're suspicious. Microsoft are or have been primarily a software company and have to get revenue from somewhere. Lots of guessing out there but no ones really sure where the money's coming from to continue developing Windows. Some say they had no choice though as Apple and Google have been giving their software away for some time. Apple though get revenue from the hardware so presumably can afford to give away the OS and their other software. They also get revenue from iTunes and their App Store.

Be careful with Microsoft Update. I know we are all too careful (we are aren't we?) to fall for the "automatic updates" that MS offers us but when updating manually you do need to check what they are actually foisting on you.

At one time "important updates" meant things like security fixes. Now it includes things that MS really want you to have. Things like invasive default privacy settings that you have to jump through hoops to turn off. These come built into W10 but MS is trying to foist it on the unsuspecting for W7 upwards. Along with forced automatic updates (then they've really got you!)

It took me (Windows 8.1) a long time to find out how to get rid of the pop-up that keeps wanting to install W10. Now, every update series includes an update that wants to re-install that. I uncheck it and "hide this update" and what do you know? Next update time there's another version to do the same thing.

These days I probably install no more than half the updates that MS is trying to foist on me.

I too now have windows 10.

I hate the fact that its been forced on me

Thing that really made me angry was being held to ransom to use documents I created, just pay £8 a month

I went over to Libreoffice, all free. It was a pleasure to uninstall microsoft office, even though they put it back on occasionally.

Going back into my shed to cut some metal, which will be the same as i left it, unlike my laptop that someone in America seams to control and change at will.......

And then people wonder why I, and several other people, advocate Linux.

Peter G. Shaw

MicroMart magazine had an article about it a couple of weeks ago. I wish I had bought it rather than try to read it in Smiths. Apparently you have so many days where you can backout of the upgrade and revert back. The magazine told you how

regards

Steve

Many, many years ago I used to really liked MS Word but it's gradually gone down hill in my opinion. I switched to open office ages ago and it does everything I need of a WP package. I'd still use Word 98 or whatever it was if it was free and compatible with open office though...

Thanks for the link John, program downloaded.

Thor

I too had the automatic and uninvited upgrade to W10 which annoyed me intensely. I decided to give it a go as I knew that there was a period of about 30 days during which one could revert back to the original operating system. As it seemed to running fine and there were other benefits to W10 I decided to stick with it and have been pleasantly surprised. It run my Microsoft Office suite quite happily and that is the 2000 version and all the other software I had on the computer. The upgrade was smooth and I have not had any problems since upgrading,that said I am now expecting the blue screen of death!

It seems to be faster than W7 and certainly boots up and closes in less time. If the automatic upgrade hadn't happened then I expect I would still be running W7 and resisting any change to upgrade. Overall I am quite happy with W10 now that I have run it and got used to the differences and some of its nuances.

I still have a system that's running XP, and surviving, for some of the 'legacy' software that would not run on W7.

Jimmy b, You can always use, providing you are not a business user, Microsoft Office programs by using their online versions which are free, Word Online, Xcel Online plus several others and another free alternative is Google Docs and this prog has a number of templates available plus it can import and download in many different formats.

Martin W

Windows users get some major parts of the next OS all of the time what ever version it has been. Often this will involves some serious hacking to make it work. It also makes the machines slower and slower. They have probably decided it's cheaper to give people complete free upgrades to some level of the latest OS - and in all probability added yet more things that are of commercial interest.

Here's me running a Linux I should have updated around 2 years ago. But the lack of updating is causing me a little grief as I can't install some of the latest versions of particular applications.

John

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I tried OpenOffice and LibreOffice when I went self employed. They are great if you never use tables, embedded images and objects or advanced formatting and never get sent documents created by someone else.

Going to Office 365 was like sinking into a warm bath... it's like comparing a 2-axis router to a 4-axis CNC mill. They both work but one does more with less effort.

It opens everything, but occasionally I get ODT or RTF files from contributors who use opensource programs, often easily spotted by the text margins being outside the page and similar issues.

I suppose I'll get flamed now...

:-/

Neil

Libre Office works for me, but there can be some issues with equation editor if you try to open the file with Word. However I'm not going to pay for Word when Libre Office is free. Perhaps Mr Microsoft should sort out his software so it will open Libre Office stuff correctly.

I had no problems with tables or embedded images on LibreOffice Neil - ONCE I UNDERSTOOD HOW TO USE THEM. Openoffice went something female up when it was taken over by one of the server companies. Prior to that Linux distro's came with one or the other of them according to the things they offered.

True I do moan how things are done on most of them including MS but only because I have used another now long gone that wasn't based on 60's boiler plate word processors.

John

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When Libre/Open Office are using doc, docx or rtf they are using Mr Microsoft's formats so it's their job to get it right. ODT is different but M$ support for it is improving.

The problems all arise when sharing files. The open source ones just kept messing up the formatting and if I cant open a client's documents properly, I have big problems. But I do find all the bells and whistles of Office useful too.

Neil

I updated our machines to Windows 10 + the installed version of Office. It all works very well and I have to say well done. However. The Windows 10 updates are heavy duty - the biggest was 5GB+ and you have to take them. These GB sized 'updates' look like every other month.

You cannot un-install Internet Explorer. You can disable it, but it still gets the mandatory updates and grabs a 5MB cache from somewhere.

I've already related that my Dad's 'free' broadband is now £10 a month because the W10 updates alone, breach his usage cap twice a quarter.

Another sneaky trick is that the updates try to avoid using the MS servers. So you can get your update from my machine on a P2P basis (not now you can't - switched that off that 'feature' off). On the plus side, if the update has hit my laptop, other machines on the local network don't need to download updates across the broadband connection.

At least MS promise not to read the content of your eMails (well they did last year...).

Steve

I've seen dozens of documents not display properly even within the same company just because they were using a different version of word or using an unavailable font. I kept telling the bosses not to send customers word documents and eventually the penny dropped and they started sending PDF files, problem solved. You do however need a proper PDF generator like Acrobat not some Mickey Mouse "PDF printer".

Neil & others,

If you look into it, I think you will find that the formats as used by Open & Libre Office are actually the correct formats to use as defined by ISO/IEC as an international standard in ISO/IEC 26300 - Open Document Format for Office Applications. This suggests to me that it is actually Microsoft who are in the wrong, not for the first time as I understand it.

The problem is that because Microsoft have gained a stranglehold in a large number of places such that those people who have not been taught anything different think that Microsoft Office is the be-all and end-all of office applications and hence don't know what to do when faced with an ODT document, say.

The Wikipedia article on Open Documents discusses this further.

Unfortunately, it will take a long, long time until people stop using Microsoft's proprietary formats.

Peter G. Shaw