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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

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things I thought Windows 8 did really right was trying to instill into applications the lifecycle that they could be force closed/rebooted at any time and should be good at saving and restoring state across application starts. This is good beyond just system restarts and good in general to know that applications would typically come back to where you left off after the system losing connectivity or going t…

That's the very reason I didn't use any Metro apps on my work computer. They would get swapped out of memory and killed whenever I ALT+TABbed from them . Not joking. Every time I wanted to switch to a normal app for a second and then back to the Metro one, the latter would have to "restore" itself (and guess what, it never restored to the point I last left it). Of course I know the reason - that's because my machine…

Oh, but it's great! I can't browse most sites on my android because the LMK for some reason starts with the damn browser. I love it! /s

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

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

End users and tech people always knee-jerk about anything that changes, whether it's a positive change or not. The Ribbon interface they introduced in Office back in 2007 was a huge improvement over the mess of dialogs, toolbars and menus they had before by every metric. People still bitch about it, almost a decade later. The people who bitch about it benefit as much as everybody else from the increased usability, bu…

Not sure I agree. Sure, there's lot of change-bitching (like people complaining about Facebook timelines), and every change breaks someone's workflow ( https://xkcd.com/1172/ ), but quite a lot of those changes people complain about are really making the applications worse. You brought up Office's ribbon. Sure, it was a "look&feel benefit", but it also significantly hurt discoverability and reduced the number of feat…

> Sure, it was a "look&feel benefit", but it also significantly hurt discoverability and reduced the number of features available.

I think that the ribbon design itself actually helped discoverability, at the expense of familiarity for long-term users of the old interface (OTOH, I think that simultaneously with the introduction of the ribbon, they also made it so a lot of options that previously were on the UI required customization to actually have them surfaced at all -- which they also, IIRC, did in some previous versions without changing the UI structure -- and, IIRC again, they reversed some of the most egregious of those in 2010.)

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

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. My mother called me in tears because she was tricked into installing Windows 10 on her PC and she can no longer sync photos from her camera.

English is not my first language, so I am curious. When you say 'in tears' are you using some metaphor or was she actually crying?

Usually in English it's not metaphorical.

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

#374

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I wouldn't be upset if Windows 10 hadn't turned into a telemetry botnet for Microsoft. Edit: I see in other posts accusations of paranoia. But how can I not be paranoid when I cannot determine what is being transmitted.

I take it that you don't use a smartphone, either, since you have no way of knowing what is transmitted either, either by the primary OS or the secondary radio OS. http://www.osnews.com/story/27416/The_second_operating_syste... Or macOS (nee OS X), since Apple gathers telemetry as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11907060 Moreover, security researchers looking to make a name for themselves are crawling all…

I'd rather be betrayed by N devices than N+1.

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

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if you think about it, it has the exact same problem: until you reboot, your Linux box is still running the known-buggy code. This has not been true for some time, and not in any mainstream distributions currently that come to mind.

How do they solve the problem without requiring, at minimum, closing all of the user's applications and restarting them, then closing all system services and restarting them? (At which point, you've basically done a de-facto OS restart.)

>How do they solve the problem without requiring, at minimum, closing all of the user's applications and restarting them, then closing all system services and restarting them? (At which point, you've basically done a de-facto OS restart.)

But this is not what you suggested, is it?

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

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 minute…

I wonder if the EULA is enforceable at all, given the circumstances. "Accept or I'll break your computer for hours" seems like a contract accepted under duress.

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

#377
This doesn't just affect upgrades from earlier versions of Windows to Windows 10. I've seen Windows 10 computers spontaneously become unusable for hours, saying "All your files are exactly where you left them." Real helpful.

I haven't personally used Windows in years, but I remember a completely unproductive day at work when we installed a Visual Studio upgrade that look approximately 24 hours to install (might have been 18, or maybe 36 -- I forget) with no option to cancel. At least that was a bug that Microsoft later admitted to and fixed.

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

#378
post #278

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.

I prefered 7 to XP. XP used to screw up and need to be restored from a disk image fairly often, 7 not so much.

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

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, I haven't either, that's why I said "I'd love to see you try". You'd think the system would be smart enough to realize that it's literally never been awake at 3:30am.

The ACPI power spec allows the computer to set an alarm and have it woken up at a particular time... like 3:30am

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

#380
post #186
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…

I installed Windows 10, and then discovered that the third-party driver that I needed for work was not compatible. Namely, the Roland REAC Driver. That driver acts as a network protocol that you attach to a particular network adapter, so when I upgraded, the adapter showed up as having no protocols. Totally Roland’s fault, waiting until the final release of Windows 10 before even starting to work on upgrading their d…

> I installed Windows 10, and then discovered that the third-party driver that I needed for work was not compatible

Similar. I KNOW that my wifi adapter's driver is not compatible with Windows 10. So were I to upgrade, I'd have no Wifi until I buy a new adapter, which I don't want to do for that machine. So the constant harassment to upgrade is frustrating.

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