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Windows 7 computers are automatically starting the Windows 10 upgrade

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Re: Windows 7 computers are automatically starting the Windows 10 upgrade

#191

Re-posting my comment from the other thread which didn't get as much attention: I spent about 3 hours this week doing tech support for my mom over the phone because of Windows 10's aggressive upgrading behaviour. I told her to keep her the best way to keep safe security wise is to make sure the os/browser is up to date, and because Windows 10 keeps asking to upgrade, she went ahead and did so. After upgrading to Wind…

I had this exact same issue with my work machine and my at home workstation. Wifi adapter completely broken, I tried to revert back to Windows 8 on my work machine and it gets stuck on a black screen for over 24 hours. I tried to power down to restart it but no luck. Somehow everything got corrupted. Had to completely reformat the drive and install the operating system all over again, which it then proceeded to upgra…

Same issue here. I actually upgraded to Win 10 from Win 7 about 3 months ago. Then 3 weeks back, an automatic update, and lost both Wifi and Wired connectivity. - No use updating drivers (they are not available for Win 10). -Cannot go back to Win 7 from System Update (since that option available only for a month). -Since Win7 is pre-installed, cannot even download a CSO image file with my product key!

I am still lost about what to do. Thankfully, after a complete restore to first Win10, I have wired connectivity back.

Re: Windows 7 computers are automatically starting the Windows 10 upgrade

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the one hand, a bunch of old insecure machines will get fixed. On the other hand, a bunch of other old insecure machines will get bricked. In other words, win/win for security teams fighting botnets.

> On the one hand, a bunch of old insecure machines will get fixed. That makes little sense. If a machine is automatically installing Windows 10, it was already automatically installing security updates. Windows 10 won't make it and less "insecure" than it was with Windows 7.

I believe 10 has some security improvements over 7. At least I hope so. I was thinking of upgrading my mum's pc basically for that reason.

Re: Windows 7 computers are automatically starting the Windows 10 upgrade

#193
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't worth much, but - believe it or not - it's not totally worthless either. Note my wording though: I believe it does happen at times, I doubt it happens with the frequency claimed on HN and reddit. Hearing more first-hand accounts of it occurring is required for me to move substantially on my opinion. As is, it's primarily speculation and people asking others to "trust them, it happens." That said, I could do…

First hand accounts? As in someone saying "yes, I do this"?

Well I was more thinking along the lines of "yeah, I personally saw this done for my product/company." So, second-hand I guess. But first-hand experience of the second-hand account, if that makes sense. At any rate, the point is this: I'm not going to take it on faith, and I won't naturally assume the most sinister thing is occurring.

Re: Windows 7 computers are automatically starting the Windows 10 upgrade

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does your father still have the laptop? If so, ask him not to use it until you can get hold of it, and when you do I'd suggest running a Linux live distro on the machine with tools to recover deleted files, there's a decent chance you'll be able to recover many of them. I've had success with the tools included in Trinity Rescue Kit before, so I can recommend that to you. I've used it to recover a bunch of pictures th…

Probably a lost cause. He had over 4K photos that he had taken in the 70s digitized from slides and organized. All that work was blown away. He has digi backups of the files, but all the organization and notes are gone. He's 77 with a quad-bypass in December, and the thought of starting over is, well, depressing for him. Not sure he's going to even try at this point.

How do you do a backup that retains Windows metadata?

Re: Windows 7 computers are automatically starting the Windows 10 upgrade

#195

As the lead developer of the Slack Windows app, this move is absolutely phenomenal for me. Win7 is a huge proportion of our support tickets and causes us no end of grief. To put what these Windows users are doing in perspective, Windows users are holding onto an OS that was released at the same time as OS X 10.6, and not only doing it, but demanding that developers support this version. If you asked any Cocoa develop…

So don't support Windows 7 then. But forcing upgrades which can lead to machines no longer functioning just means that person wipes the HDD and reinstalls Windows 7.

You miss the fact that Windows 8 was such a botch job that most of us didn't start upgrading until Windows 8.1 - and this isn't just end users, but a hell of a lot of IT professionals. This never occurred on OS X.

Re: Windows 7 computers are automatically starting the Windows 10 upgrade

#196
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this a big deal? Why should MSFT not do this? Here are a couple of reasons why... Perhaps the machine hardware is not Win10 compliant Perhaps a machine hosts software that requires significant regression testing before permitting an upgrade to Win10 Perhaps the machine's software is not Win10 compatible and needs to be rewritten before a Win10 upgrade Perhaps the machine in question has specific greenzone peri…

The upgrade notification system does make the effort to check against known-bad hardware and software, including 3rd party software, and will warn and/or block the upgrade if it's known to be incompatible. As for managed machines, most won't be eligible for the upgrade to begin with (domain joined, Windows 7 Enterprise), and the upgrade can be blocked entirely via Group Policy or WSUS. Any sensibly managed machine in…

It is fair to say that as they cannot know that upgrading to a new major release of their operating system will never lead to non-functioning systems they should never have attempted a forced major upgrade of Windows.

If they know that there are cases where their compatibility checker won't detect setups that have problems then they shouldn't iPad automatically. Full stop.

Re: Windows 7 computers are automatically starting the Windows 10 upgrade

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Pretty much this. You do need some updates though, and Microsoft hardly does a good job of describing what each update does from WU itself, so hope you like looking up each individual update on the MS website. Eventually they'll just start obfuscating what an update does on the website as well, if not lying outright.

If not lying outright? There's no grand conspiracy here. Put the tinfoil hat away...

The time to make jokes about tinfoil hats is long past. It's no longer debatable that we're seeing either incompetence or malice on Microsoft's part.

I don't know which, and don't really care. Either way, there's a case to be made for disabling updates entirely.

Re: Windows 7 computers are automatically starting the Windows 10 upgrade

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Pretty much this. You do need some updates though, and Microsoft hardly does a good job of describing what each update does from WU itself, so hope you like looking up each individual update on the MS website. Eventually they'll just start obfuscating what an update does on the website as well, if not lying outright.

If not lying outright? There's no grand conspiracy here. Put the tinfoil hat away...

Well, they already say within WU itself that KB3035583 is to resolve "important issues in Windows" which is a lie. But lying about what the update does on their page for the update at microsoft.com is somehow a stretch?

Re: Windows 7 computers are automatically starting the Windows 10 upgrade

#199
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude. Personal attacks aren't welcome here. I think you know this, as you are using a throwaway account.

And yet the law is applied unfairly on HN. Dang warned me that I'd be banned if I ever insinuated that somebody was shilling, yet several people are openly doing it in this thread. I don't see their warnings. Sorry for continuing the derail, but it's downright infuriating when you see moderation not applied equally to everyone.

Don't be infuriated. It's only because we don't see all the comments.

Btw, it's true that I asked you not to accuse other users of shilling (the same way I'd ask anybody), but not true that I said we'd ban you for it.

Re: Windows 7 computers are automatically starting the Windows 10 upgrade

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Depending on the size of the HDD and the amount of data lost, there's a good chance that some data can be recovered, especially small files like office documents. That said, it's a HDD wipe followed immediately by a full Windows installation, so there's a high chance a lot of the data were overwritten already.

Sure, there's a chance some of it was overwritten already, though hopefully Windows 7 and Windows 10 are a similar size on disk, which would mean that it'd mostly be OS files that were overwritten (as Windows should be installed on the early sectors of the hard disk in both cases).

> as Windows should be installed on the early sectors of the hard disk in both cases)

Not after enough updates.

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