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

extremetech.com

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

#271

Post by marssaxman »

freehunter wrote: post #236
Shorel wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could keep patching XP to avoid the security issues. This is more about taking control away from users than anything else.

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 th…

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.

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

#272

Post by snuxoll »

doodpants wrote: post #205
snuxoll wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#273

Post by delecti »

noxToken wrote: post #225
freehunter wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have never had a Windows laptop boot up for scheduled updates. In that event, it always waitied for the next manual boot.

If the computer is sleeping it can wake up. Not sure about hibernate.

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

#274

Post by moskie »

cm2187 wrote: post #105
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…

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...

That is a crappy metaphor.

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

#275

Post by [deleted] »

fapjacks wrote: post #228
Decade wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

For the record, Linux does not do this, and it is an operating system.

[deleted]

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

#276

Post by whyoh »

794CD01 wrote: post #177
FussyZeus wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>You can turn it off via group policy if you have windows enterprise.

No, you can't. You can only set it to a lower level.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/itpro/windows/manage/con...

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

#277

Post by stinos »

fapjacks wrote: post #228
Decade wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

For the record, Linux does not do this, and it is an operating system.

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.

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

#278

Post by yugai »

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.

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

#280

Post by tracker1 »

wang_li wrote: post #250
eropple wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 the…

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.

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