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Forced Windows 10 Upgrade Shuts Down PC Used by Anti-Poaching Rangers in Africa

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Re: Forced Windows 10 Upgrade Shuts Down PC Used by Anti-Poaching Rangers in Africa

#71

Post by codedokode »

Using dark UI patterns (like dialogs without cancel button) is disrespectful to users. They bought Windows to get stable and reliable operationg system. The system that updates at night and gets drivers or software broken is nowhere near stable. Even linux (which is awful as desktop system) doesn't autoupdate.

It might be acceptable if Microsoft gave their product away for free: many free products (e.g. Sublime or Skype) include annoying autoupdate popups for non-paying users. But Windows is quite expensive software.

Microsoft's motives are just getting more paid services, getting more telemetry (for free! they do not pay for it) and maybe adding some kind of subscription in future. Recent Windows versions like 7 or 8 seem to be 'good enough' for most customers so they do not want to upgrade for free let alone buy newer versions.

And subscription is as bad as DRM.

Re: Forced Windows 10 Upgrade Shuts Down PC Used by Anti-Poaching Rangers in Africa

#72

Post by yuhong »

codedokode wrote: post #71

Using dark UI patterns (like dialogs without cancel button) is disrespectful to users. They bought Windows to get stable and reliable operationg system. The system that updates at night and gets drivers or software broken is nowhere near stable. Even linux (which is awful as desktop system) doesn't autoupdate. It might be acceptable if Microsoft gave their product away for free: many free products (e.g. Sublime or Sk…

This is a good time to mention selling Windows to a non-profit foundation, so that Windows would truly be actually free. I remember a comment mentioning retirement funds.

Re: Forced Windows 10 Upgrade Shuts Down PC Used by Anti-Poaching Rangers in Africa

#73

Post by hackney »

asimuvPR wrote: post #40

I tune cars as as as a hobby. My current setup is based around windows xp due to driver supports (technically an embedded application). My plan was to upgrade to a windows 8 machine and emulate an xp install. But I'm not going to anymore. I tune while driving and it could be catastrophic to have the machine install updates. I'll continue with the air gapped xp machine. Too bad because I was looking forward to not usi…

If you would update to 8, which is more of a TS interface with an ap store, why not windows 7? You could have a 64bit OS with a nice quad core+ cpu which is impossible in XP. Then you could virtual machine xp on top of that and have the latest and greatest. XP is rather dated to say the least. The only reason to run it is if you have older hardware such as a pentium 4 single core processor on board.

Re: Forced Windows 10 Upgrade Shuts Down PC Used by Anti-Poaching Rangers in Africa

#74

Post by [deleted] »

mavhc wrote: post #67
Mithaldu wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: After some thinking: Yes, i agree this is a dark pattern and MS needs to be held accountable to it accordingly. My only disagreement with the current direction of discourse is that people are not saying "MS manipulated me into an update", which is the truth, but "Windows updated on its own and there was nothing anyone could do", which isn't. -- They didn't change it, it was always that way. People only realized…

If people could read we'd live in a completely different world, run by people elected by voters because it was in their best interests; where no one clicked a EULA, because the contents of them are insane; and no one bought the extended warranty.

[deleted]

Re: Forced Windows 10 Upgrade Shuts Down PC Used by Anti-Poaching Rangers in Africa

#75

Post by insickness »

asimuvPR wrote: post #40

I tune cars as as as a hobby. My current setup is based around windows xp due to driver supports (technically an embedded application). My plan was to upgrade to a windows 8 machine and emulate an xp install. But I'm not going to anymore. I tune while driving and it could be catastrophic to have the machine install updates. I'll continue with the air gapped xp machine. Too bad because I was looking forward to not usi…

Windows 7 is solid. I had Windows 10 on my laptop and downgraded because it provided zero benefit. There are ways to prevent Windows 7 from from nagging you to upgrade.

Re: Forced Windows 10 Upgrade Shuts Down PC Used by Anti-Poaching Rangers in Africa

#76

Post by cm2187 »

yuhong wrote: post #65
mavhc wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large businesses. It's the DIY small businesses that always have problems. They should switch to Chrome OS.

This is a good time to mention that the minimum for volume licensing is only 5 copies.

If the company only has 5-10 employees, it is pretty safe to assume they will not have a dedicated IT function who would worry for them about volume licensing, domain joined systems, etc. They likely just buy a laptop on Dell's website which comes with whatever version of the OS Dell tells them is good for them.

Re: Forced Windows 10 Upgrade Shuts Down PC Used by Anti-Poaching Rangers in Africa

#77

Post by yuhong »

cm2187 wrote: post #76
yuhong wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good time to mention that the minimum for volume licensing is only 5 copies.

If the company only has 5-10 employees, it is pretty safe to assume they will not have a dedicated IT function who would worry for them about volume licensing, domain joined systems, etc. They likely just buy a laptop on Dell's website which comes with whatever version of the OS Dell tells them is good for them.

Yea, I know many of them probably don't know this.

Re: Forced Windows 10 Upgrade Shuts Down PC Used by Anti-Poaching Rangers in Africa

#78

Post by swang »

Mithaldu wrote: post #52
Joeri wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a user action to install it, but it's pretty sneaky. MS changed the behavior of the upgrade question dialog that if you close it with x it will start the download and then install when ready. Your girlfriend must have clicked the x some time prior to the sudden upgrade. Even my tech-savvy coworker who didn't want to upgrade got caught out by this. Anyway, you can still roll back, and then install never10.

Edit: After some thinking: Yes, i agree this is a dark pattern and MS needs to be held accountable to it accordingly. My only disagreement with the current direction of discourse is that people are not saying "MS manipulated me into an update", which is the truth, but "Windows updated on its own and there was nothing anyone could do", which isn't. -- They didn't change it, it was always that way. People only realized…

Surely you're joking? "Click here to change your upgrade schedule" is in such tiny font of course no one will see it.

If Microsoft cared about its users, that option would be way bigger than it is.

Edit: They purposely put in all that information because they know people won't want to read through all that. That dialog is purposely designed to trick users because they've been taught that if they want to cancel, hit the "X" button, not find the tiny link to change the scheduling of this thing you don't understand.

Re: Forced Windows 10 Upgrade Shuts Down PC Used by Anti-Poaching Rangers in Africa

#79

Post by bitwize »

yuhong wrote: post #72
codedokode wrote: post #71

Using dark UI patterns (like dialogs without cancel button) is disrespectful to users. They bought Windows to get stable and reliable operationg system. The system that updates at night and gets drivers or software broken is nowhere near stable. Even linux (which is awful as desktop system) doesn't autoupdate. It might be acceptable if Microsoft gave their product away for free: many free products (e.g. Sublime or Sk…

This is a good time to mention selling Windows to a non-profit foundation, so that Windows would truly be actually free. I remember a comment mentioning retirement funds.

Apache Windows?

Re: Forced Windows 10 Upgrade Shuts Down PC Used by Anti-Poaching Rangers in Africa

#80

Post by yuhong »

cmurf wrote: post #48
CamperBob2 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this debacle can be blamed on Ballmer, and certainly not on Gates. In fact, I have to wonder if the reason why Ballmer was finally handed his walking papers by the board was that he was unwilling to greenlight these frog-marched upgrades to Windows 10. Somebody very powerful at Microsoft, or perhaps elsewhere, wants everybody to accept this free update way, way too badly, and it's not clear why.

They're getting their asses handed to them by malware. They have a huge attack surface of users on various versions of Windows. Forced upgrades reduces that attack surface of older versions of Windows. That's all I can think of. In open source software where this is more transparent, computer security is hard. Backporting fixes is harder, and expensive, and has its own risks. Microsoft can't be immune to the same pro…

Yea, WinSE does cost money too and I think I saw a mention that it is considered a cost center.
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