GWX Control Panel http://ultimateoutsider.com/downloads/
Disables virtually all possibilities of auto-upgrades.
Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade
311–320 of 451 posts
Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 de…
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 Microsof…
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."
Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade
#313Earlier 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…
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…
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.
Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 , no…
Because it's a problem that should have been fixed 15 years ago.
Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even dismissing the windows is considered "yes, upgrade". That way beyond sneaky, that's just black pattern.
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.…
Yes, it is necessary to accept EULA.
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?
Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 declin…
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 ge…
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.
Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade
#318Think of all of the wasted effort and money because microsoft didn't force people off of IE6 quick enough.
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.
Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade
#319I 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.
Users don't buy a windows license with an expiration date.
Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade
#320Am I the only one who leaves the Windows Update service entry disabled under the "services" settings? Seriously, it's that simple. I check once a week, tops.
You are a responsible administrator, and should be rewarded with system stability and job satisfaction. Good work.