Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

extremetech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 451 posts

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#111

Post by wvenable »

pdx wrote: post #93
wvenable wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#112

Post by Bartweiss »

snuxoll wrote: post #67
creshal wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" ch…

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...

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#113

Post by lloeki »

15charlimit wrote: post #68
Someone1234 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sympathetic both ways on this one. 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…

> 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 ino…

> 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?

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#114

Post by Bartweiss »

overgard wrote: post #86

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…

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.

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#115

Post by Nullabillity »

josefresco wrote: post #79

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…

> 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.

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#117

Post by barefootcoder »

Someone1234 wrote: post #54
themartorana wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

I'm sympathetic both ways on this one. 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…

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?

Or maybe you were referring to the free updates?

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#118

Post by djsumdog »

bluecalm wrote: post #41

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).

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#119

Post by dragonwriter »

snuxoll wrote: post #67
creshal wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" ch…

> 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...

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#120

Post by JoeAltmaier »

lloeki wrote: post #113
15charlimit wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ino…

> 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-…

Say half a dozen disputable things, and you get a lot of folks disagreeing. To be expected.
Post reply on HN