Public service announcement: as announced October last year, Windows 10 is now a recommended upgrade in Windows Update, meaning the installation will automatically start.
As announced last October, the free Windows 10 update has been promoted from an “optional” update to being a “recommended” one. This means that with the default Windows Update settings, the new operating system will be downloaded automatically, and its installer will be started.
The operating system will not actually install itself unattended; Microsoft says that users will be able to reject the upgrade or reschedule it for a time that’s more convenient. The company has also described a variety of registry settings that suppress the upgrade.
Windows 10 will be the most popular Windows version of all time! Just look at all those people upgrading!
Even though Windows 10 is a pile of shit with all the restrictions regarding suppressing automated background operations, fighting the upgrade is stupid. It’s everyone’s duty to keep their computers up-to-date and this is really the least painful way of achieving that.
I am cautiously optimistic that Microsoft will at some point re-enable the switches for turning of forced system updates, “malware scans” and other unnecessary and stupid “features”.
Either upgrade or switch operating system.
And if I depend on drivers and software, for my livelihood no less, that won’t work on any other operating system nor on Windows 10? Perhaps you should suppress your asshole nature a bit to consider things like this.
Well, since older versions of Windows won’t work on newer CPUs, you’re gonna have to figure out something eventually. Might as well be sooner rather than later, unless you’re gonna be one of those people waiting until the last minute.
That being said, I am definitely NOT in favor of this move by Microsoft. Somebody needs to start up a #nomeansno hash tag for them until they finally get the point.
Edited 2016-02-02 22:10 UTC
This crap again? Older operating systems will work on newer CPUs, they just won’t take advantage of the features of newer CPUs. There’s no doomsday clock that will make Windows 7 suddenly stop running on a Skylake processor a few months from now. Eventually pre-Win10 drivers will stop being written/updated for core components like audio and video, and certain yet to be invented CPU features will likely never work in older OSes, but that’s how it has been since the beginning of home computing. Nothing is changing, nothing is new, it’s the same cycle it’s always been.
I thought you were smart enough to not parrot bullshit FUD.
What about VM’s then eh?
How often is it really a 10000000% requirement (apart from device drivers and Realtime) that you run on bare metal?
My work laptop is now boots into Linux (CentOS). all the windows versions and dev + test env’s run in VM’s.
As these are all Server version of windows I can escape the worst of MS’s twistedness. Server 2016 is a steaming pile of dog poo from a U/I POV. Been downhill in usability since 2008-R2.
I’m probably going to surrender by the end of the year and ditch MS entirely. But I’ll be retired then.
Two words: Industrial machinery.
a) for computer, where the computer directly controls the machine, you don’t update the computer, not even regular windows updates, until the vendor/maintenance company says you can and it will support it. Upgrading OS is out of question entirely, until you do that as a project.
b) for computer, that is used to program machines, mapping serial and usb ports directly to virtual machine is a piece of cake. I also have a certain app that runs only in ancient version of Windows and talks to serial port. With virtual machine, it is perfectly isolated from real operating system and will work indefinitely as when it was new.
Good points, but there are scenarios still where the old systems are needed as it is much cheaper still to replace a 2000$ computer than to replace an entire machine line for arodun 20 million USD.
It was mainly a response to those saying that everyone should upgrade at once, i was merely pointing out that it is not viable for some scenarios. Some systems even require OS/2, and that os is notoriously hard to virtualize properly. A machine system might have a 30 years lifespan and lets say it was installed in 1994, so the system that it was designed for is expected in this case would be running until 2024 for full ROI (Return of investment)
Just because I’m curious wouldn’t any recommended update be detrimental to a machine like that? Not just Windows 10. I would think that a machine that important would be manually updated and disconnected from the internet or behind a firewall.
I’ve been around a lot of manufacturing machines with a lot of machines connected to old equipment that are that important and can’t be upgraded to anything newer. Windows 2000 and XP for most of them. Every once in a while something older. And in all cases if they are being looked after by an IT staff careful about keeping them running, so they are not exposed to the internet and are only manually updated.
I guess I don’t really understand the issue for the non IT public. Some of the biggest complaints with MS is people running old unpatched machines. Something MS is now aggressively addressing and it’s being condemned. Competent IT staff are aware what’s happening and can setup their networks accordingly. Seems the update is setup from MS precisely for those who do no updating. How exactly should an update like this be addressed with the audience that doesn’t update on their own or even know they should be updating?
While I would generally agree with thi sentiment, there are a couple of very specific issues with it:
1. The update doesn’t work consistently. I’ve talked to at least as many people for whom the update to Windows 10 didn’t work at all as have had it work correctly. If you’re going to force an update on someone, it needs to work without them having to bend over backwards to finish it, and if it fails, it needs to give a more helpful error message than ‘Something happened.’.
2. The recommendations MS makes to remedy the first issue involve partial or complete disassembly of the system. This isn’t an option for laptops, is not realistic for most consumers with desktops, and is not at all something that should be required for a software upgrade. Apple doesn’t make you take apart your iPhone for an iOS upgrade, Google doesn’t make you take apart your Android phone for a system update, there is no reason Microsoft should make you take apart your computer for a Windows upgrade. The very fact that they suggest this says to me that they didn’t do any kind of realistic testing of the upgrade process.
3. The forced driver version locking is a horrible thing for a lot people. A majority of the people who need to keep their drivers up-to-date are already doing so, and the fact that you can’t turn this off means that they can’t test new versions properly. This could be remedied of course if more vendors actually properly tested everything in their drivers before shipping them, but that is a separate issue.
4. Looking at 3 further, most of the people who worry about specific GPU driver versions are either gamers or graphic designers, both of whom usually know a whole hell of a lot better than Microsoft does what they actually need on their system. This same logic can be applied to storage drivers and server admins, and a number of other specific cases.
5. Most of the reason that people turn off automatic updates is that MS consistently breaks things with updates. They have been getting better about this, but I still hear reports from time to time (and even experience such issues where I work) of them breaking their own software with updates, and lots more of third-party software being horribly broken (this is of course the fault of the developers of said third-party software, but people blame Microsoft because they are the source of the update).
ahferroin7,
Some people may not be aware that this is a real thing. There is literally a dialog box titled “Something happened” when an unspecified error occurs during the win10 install.
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-windows…
Yeah, this seems to be their catch-all error when something they couldn’t be bothered to provide a proper error message happens. The only way I’ve seen to consistently get it to happen is to try and upgrade from a copy of Windows using a locale setting not supported yet in Windows 10 (which is even funnier, because the message appears to always show up in English, regardless of what locale you have set).
Then look to upgrade the hardware or software that is holding you back.
If you don’t make it possible to upgrade to a newer operating system, sooner or later you are going to find it impossible to maintain your livelihood.
Turning off updates can be done via local group policy tool.
http://superuser.com/questions/946957/stopping-all-automatic-update…
I’ve turned them off on my work machine as I am testing the running of data migration scripts in python which are taking over 20 hours to complete on average.
I would have run these things on a server machine, but alas my tasks aren’t deemed important enough for one of those.
Edited 2016-02-02 20:59 UTC
There are scant reasons for people not to upgrade. The OS is newer, quicker and probably a lot more secure than 7.
As for people complaining about privacy it really isn’t any different to Vista / 7 except for Cortana. Which isn’t any really any different than Google Now, Siri or S-Voice.
The most irritating thing is the fact that the power management settings seem to be all over the place compared to 7 and 8. My monitors wouldn’t go to sleep last week and now I have no idea if my PC will sleep when I leave the flat.
Edited 2016-02-02 21:01 UTC
Hi,
The fact that Microsoft are trying so hard to ram it down people’s throats “for free” is a massive red flag all by itself.
– Brendan
It is called software engineering … it easier to support fewer differing code bases rather than many.
Also unlike a lot of people on here I don’t suffer from the ridiculous paranoia.
Edited 2016-02-03 18:34 UTC
how about these for reasons?
I don’t want a tiled UI
Full Screen panels might be ok on a small scteen but a 4K screen ? Really?
do want 99% of your screen to be white when openeing up the control panel?
The huge Icon/tile that appears when you drag/drop files is just silly. It often actually obscures where you want to drop a file.
The changes to things like Outlook make it really hard for us older folks to use. 1 or 2 pixel wide divider lines do not cut it when you are 60+
I could go on for several hours about how bad the UI is for anything post Windows 7/Server 2008-R2 but I’d be wasting my time and yours.
Yes because it is going to be mostly nonsense.
Edited 2016-02-03 18:42 UTC
Why upgrade?
The existing Windows 7 setup works fine. Newer isn’t a feature. Quicker may be a feature, but there’s no issue with the current speed. More secure is a relative term, given that you basically can’t stop the OS from leaking to Microsoft. And given that I don’t use Google Now, Siri or S-Voice (whatever that is), I don’t see why I need to run Cortana.
And what’s your officially-supported replacement to WMC? Don’t link the instructions to hacktivate WMC on Win10; what’s the official Microsoft-endorsed way to display Cablecard-secured content on Windows 10?
That’s what I thought.
I said “scant” reason which means there are some that have applications that have no replacement.
There is always going to be some special snowflake that has X amount of reasons that the mostly make up why they can’t upgrade.
https://xkcd.com/1172/
It is pretty much a joke in the software engineering industry at this point.
Edited 2016-02-03 18:36 UTC
> Turn Cortana and the other stuff off. Problems solved.
>
> It not like they made a control panel where you can turn everyone on and off again … oh wait they did.
Did you try it? It doesn’t work. After you disable Cortana and web search integration, every search in start menu is still being sent to Bing.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not comfortable with that. In my book, something like that is simply unacceptable.
Err no it doesn’t.
I will prove it.
https://imgur.com/ECydy5W
I am running fiddler to detect any http requests while I have much of the search stuff disabled.
As you can see if isn’t sending anything via HTTP or HTTPS to anywhere.
Err, it does.
http://imgur.com/a/EKrck
I suggest you use a real firewall, not a dev proxy. Preferably one not running on the same OS as the one you try to check out.
it seems I need to use “Stream option”
Nevertheless the information it sends it stuff like screensize and some other crap. It stuff I couldn’t give a shit about.
Credits to a KMFDM song.
I think MicroSoft are being jerks.
Still amused that it took till now for win10 installs to beat winXP ..an O/S that’s been unsupported for >12 months. That makes me smirk.
People must be LOOOOVING IT!
Why wouldn’t it take this long? WinXP is being used on many different platforms whereas Win10 isn’t. Of course it was going to take Win10 a minute to catch up considering the fact. You can smirk at that if you want but it’s pretty stupid to do so.
Oh yes there are some reasons to call for the upgrade to Windows 10, more security, it support newer hardware, it is more modern (whatever that means), but the reasons not to upgrade to windows 10 are stronger:
1. Many older drivers are not supported
2. It is new on the market, and still has the multitude of bugs it will take months or years for Microsoft to clean most of them.
3. It is not clear yet (at least to me) which irreplaceable old programs will stop working on this new platform
4. Windows 10 forces the user to stay up to date, even when it will break the functionality of some dll ( (it happened with its service packs and will happen again)
5. By forcing a constant update, there will be high internet costs for users who have limited bandwidth
6. Windows 10 includes spywares and transmit a lot of information about user and its activities to Microsoft
7. Microsoft allows itself to sell my data to 3rd parties (https://edri.org/microsofts-new-small-print-how-your-personal-data-a…)
8. And this is the most important, I don’t want a companies decide for me to put on my computer the OS they want.
Microsoft simply act like a bully and it attacks both our privacy and freedom. You may accept it for “a newer OS” I don’t. I am glad there are alternatives.
You say that but still seem to be stuck on Windows ? The main alternative if you’re stuck with an EOL’d OS is to run it on a VM, as isolated from the internet as possible. But there are plenty of other OSes out there (I won’t insult OSnews readers with a listing) that give you far more freedom and control.
“more security” – Everyone says it is about the same
“newer hardware” – Yes but it drops support for not so old hardware and old hardware that realistically should work)
“modern” This is just marketing speak.
As a visually impaired person with almost full colour blindness the 8, 8.1 and 10 ui is completely unusable as it is almost impossible to find the destinction between control objects and content..
I can’s wait for this “everything has to be flat” debacle to be over and passed to the dustbin of history.
…who also uses Windows 10 on an almost daily basis.
I kind of like it. Windows 7 is what I prefer, but the guts of W10 are probably better.
There have been many people calling for a version of W10 with the W7 UI. Sadly this is apparently herecy in the Microsoft La-la land of fairies and goblins praising Windows 10.
I kind of have to agree to a certain extent, with a couple of caveats:
1. Their mDNS support is broken (check your system logs when you’ve been on a network with Windows 10, you’ll see all kinds of messages from Avahi about bad response packets, those are a result of MS yet again incorrectly implementing a simple protocol).
2. Forced updates are bad, especially driver updates. They’re trying to force businesses onto the Enterprise version (which you need an insanely expensive subscription to get). I’m all for staying up to date (I run Gentoo’s unstable branch and update daily), but only if I can actually roll back updates that break things, and on Windows you can’t even figure out except by a brute force search which update actually broke things most of the time.
3. There is still no SSH support (I hear this may be changing though, although like usual, it will only be a client implementation because they still fail to understand that a GUI isn’t needed for everything).
4. Some of their critically important software still doesn’t run under PowerShell (bcdedit for example won’t work at all, and there are a small handful of older tools they keep around that don’t work correctly).
5. They still depend on NetBIOS in multiple ways (XP and 2k were the only Windows versions that could be run without any NetBIOS functionality whatsoever), and as such need some insane firewall hacks to do any kind of partitioned network, and default to flooding your network with broadcast traffic
6. Everything but the enterprise and server editions still has horrible performance issues when virtualized under anything except Hyper-V, even when you have PV or VirtIO drivers installed (assuming you can get those drivers to even work).
TBH Windows 10 is not going to be changing anything for me (except indirectly making it harder to run Linux on a laptop, because they removed the requirement to be able to turn off Secure Boot from their hardware certification), I’m still using Linux for almost everything, and only running Windows because a small number of the games I play during my free time only run on it (although as of now, there’s only one game I play regularly that doesn’t run on Linux at all, and I’m close to having it working under Wine, so I may be ditching Windows entirely on my personal systems).
1. I’m shocked they did support mDNS at all!
3. Actually they do understand that, at least on Windows server the Server Manager and related utilities are just frontends to powershell objects. Windows Server can be installed without GUI – installation with GUI is actually named as “legacy”.
6. What problems did you have with VirtIO drivers? Those from Fedora run pretty well.
1. I was too, but they appear to have realized that it’s not going away. Hopefully they will realize that it’s a better design than LLNR and WINS broadcasts, and then properly implement it.
3. I hadn’t realized this, although this also kind of surprises me, as it means the UI isn’t as heavily tied into the kernel as it looks like it is on non server systems.
6. I’ve had more issues with Xen PV drivers than the VirtIO ones (I use Xen more frequently than QEMU or VirtualBox), but there are intermittent issues with both. They’re both broken somewhat regularly by seemingly unrelated upgrades, signing is of course an issue, and because of hwo they had to be designed, performance still isn’t great. The bigger issue I have of course is that they insist on doing so much on an idle system, which means that running a Windows VM on something other than Hyper-V is insanely inefficient.
6) I admit, that the only Winservers we have are either on bare metal, Hyper-V or inside Virtualbox for dev machines. Those in Virtualbox are set to use Hyper-V for virtualization API and VirtIO for network. I had only once a problem with the installation of VirtIO drivers and the recommended solution was not to use the latest version. Since then, zero problems.
I actually quite like Win 2012R2 (as a remote desktop host), because it does not come with the baggage that desktop versions do – of course we do not install “desktop experience pack”.
… here came Linux Mint 17. Switched permanently a few months ago and didn’t look back. Even run games like World of Tanks and Hearthstone (supported by Battle.net) on it, thanks to Play On Linux. Booted into Windows 7 after over 2 months just to update it, error booting… Forgot I changed to IDE mode in BIOS, don’t remember why. Linux didn’t complain at all.
That said, I still have that Windows 7 installation and I’m going to upgrade it to Windows 10 (after imaging, and then back to 7). Why? Because I have to provide support on all platforms, Windows, OS X and Linux, so I have to keep up.
Be aware, that after you upgrade to Windows 10, your original Windows 7 license key will be invalidated. You will be newer able to install W7 with that key again and I don’t know, whether any imaged installation will be able pass validation either.
I suggest that for support reason, you make a fresh W10 installation in virtual machine every 30 days (or whenever an unactivated W10 expires) and keep you Windows 7 as it is.
And that’s one of the reasons I moved permanently to Linux, Microsoft’s bullshit moves. Good riddance!
I have been trying to upgrade my computer from Windows 8.1 Pro to Windows 10 but it does not work.
No matter what I try, it always ends up in a “the update failed to install”: normal Windows Update, clean directories and then Windows Update, pendrive, etc. Nothing works.
Lucky you. If you figure out how it broke, please do reply and let us know. Some of us would like to break our installation so it can’t be force updated when Microsoft inevitably stops respecting their previously-published registry/group policy object.
There are a number of ways to make it stop working:
1. Have a UEFI capable computer and run your existing copy of Windows in Legacy boot mode (this issue may have been fixed, but I’m not sure).
2. Run your existing copy of Windows in a locale they don’t support yet (you will get a cryptic ‘Something happened.’ error message when the upgrade fails).
3. Have any of a number of regular peripherals attached to your system:
* Some USB keyboards (Yubikeys and other OTP devices seemed to be consistently breaking it for a while, and some gaming keyboards do too).
* Some kinds of USB serial converters (FTDI and pl2303 appear to work, but some other chipsets may not).
* Some types of external storage device (Firewire consistently breaks things I’ve heard, I’ve also seen issues from eSATA and some USB enclosures).
* Some brands of SSD or HDD installed internally as something other than your boot drive.
* Multiple different brands of GPUs (not including Intel’s integrated GPUs).
* SCSI HBA’s not attached to any storage devices.
* Almost anything that requires 3rd-party drivers that aren’t distributed on Windows Update.
* On some motherboards, some internal fans (depending on the MB, this can change the ACPI tables, which Windows doesn’t like for some reason).
* Any number of other things that I haven’t heard of.
Keep in mind though, as of now at least, you can still decline the upgrade manually, it won’t happen automatically and I doubt that they’ll change that.
That’s not the only way to get it. Trouble is, there’s no real consistent way to make it happen either save for the method you outlined. Truthfully, I think the only appropriate punishment is to modify all of Microsoft’s installations of Visual Studio to display “something happened” on every compiler warning and error. Don’t even give a line number. Then maybe they’ll realize just how aggravating this error is when you’re trying to support this damned operating system.
What I find so funny about this is that regardless of what locale you are using, the ‘Something happened’ bit is always in English. They didn’t even bother to translate it. My guess is that it’s just their catch all for stuff they didn’t think could ever happen, but needed to have roll-back code to handle.
In a way, it’s like the changes to the BSoD in Windows 8, they’re trying to hide from the user that they have no real idea what happened either, and don’t want to scare them too much with an error message. While i understand this philosophy to a certain extent, they need to realize that not everyone is an idiot, and even among idiots, people are likely to be a lot more scared by an error that can’t be properly quantified or qualified than one that is clearly defined (most people respond a lot better if you tell them exactly what went wrong, even if they can’t fully understand it, than if you just tell them ‘something’ went wrong).
In the case of some of the more common BSoD messages from previous versions (IRQF_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL being an example, it’s a generic assertion internal to the NT kernel, so it shows up for a lot of different issues), this isn’t a case where they don’t know what happened, they are just being either lazy or deceptive.
I hate to say it, but…
“Turn Off Automatic Updates.”
I already do, and did long before this. I want to know what’s in any update that goes through my system, thanks. I do allow it to notify me of updates, but that’s it.
Hi,
I do the same (and have for a long time).
The problem now is manually sifting through the list of updates trying to figure out which ones are beneficial, which ones are broken (video drivers), and which ones are malicious; and then not updating regularly because it’s too much hassle (if you’re lucky there’s no noticeable difference between “before” and “after” anyway, and if you’re not lucky it’s noticeably worse) and having to deal with a huge list after 2+ months of not bothering.
Sometimes I wish I could go back to the 1990s (before the Internet became ubiquitous) where it was harder for developers to get away with “release buggy, patch continually”.
– Brendan
And now, almost every week I read about some reason why that was a brilliant decision. The other day I read about an FTDI driver distributed in the latest Windows update, that bricks devices where the FTDI chip is not genuine.
One of the main gripes I have with Windows 10, apart from the very intrusive malware nature of it that cannot be turned off, is the new policy of installing and rebooting the computer without the user being able to postpone it. Sorry, but that kind of shite won’t go anywhere close to my computers.
Luckily, we live in an era where there really isn’t a good reason to update your OS anymore – even Windows XP does most tasks well enough. Hence more than 10% of all computers still run Windows XP.
Last week I found an old PC of mine on which I used to compose music. It runs Windows 95. I turned it on and worked a bit on it. It’s scary how functional that computer still is!
Edited 2016-02-04 09:33 UTC
Yup, my 2007 machine (VIA C7) still runs fine under 2K/XP with “only” 1 GB of RAM. Incredible, I can edit office documents, open PDF files, print them, do some coding and cross development, edit pictures and videos, go on the internet, play some games. With 3 screens attached on it. Just like modern computers.