Member Avatar for Reverend Jim

Where

lets users learn about Windows 10 or start an upgrade to Windows 10

will eventually be

You have pressed the space bar. Do you want to upgrade to Windows 10?

Edited by Reverend Jim
Member Avatar for rproffitt

@Reverend Jim and others.

I don't want to sound as if I don't like W10. It's the accidental upgrades that I take issue with. This is liked going to be caused by MSFT being pushy about this.

Here, it's all good at over 20 machines between office, home and other places. In fact one dog of a laptop is now working great. I can only guess why but it was some old 2009 Sony VAIO laptop with the old C2D, 4GB RAM and HDD usual config. It was my sons and a return to home when they upgraded. So I don't have any problems on W10 but then I'm pretty seasoned about drivers and apps that need updates as the OS changes.

Folk that don't know their PCs or simple users are the ones that will get tripped up.

Edited by rproffitt because: Typo correction.
Member Avatar for Reverend Jim

I'm not anti-Windows 10 per se. Yes, change is inevitible, but change with a benefit to the end users should be the goal. Changing how things work under the hood to improve securiity and performance is a good thing. Changing the entire user interface simply to make everything look sparkly new is not a good thing. Do you recall the days of "New and Improved Tide" where the only change was to the design on the box? The new arrangement does not improve the interface. The changes to the interface from Windows XP to Windows 7 were, in my opinion, well worth the time I had to invest in learning the "new" way of doing things. In general things were easier to find and the start menu, especially, was a big improvement from the XP version. I've been running Windows 10 in a VM since it was first made available early last year. When I compare the extent of the changes (major) to the improvement in functionality (arguably minor) I am left shaking my head.

But by far my major complaint is how Microsoft has handled the whole transition. They started with the carrot but as of earlier this year they have moved to the stick. And they are now using Windows to stream ads (sorry, I meant "suggested apps"). Perhaps this can be justified (in part) by saying "well, you are getting the OS for free). No. I am not. The upgrade is free but I paid for my OS when I bought my laptop. And I don't want the upgrade anyway so stop forcing it on me. When I get new laptop I will be paying for that OS as well so that OS won't be free either.

Member Avatar for rproffitt

Sorry for that typo in my last post. Didn't catch it soon enough to correct with the edit.

Member Avatar for CimmerianX

I hid the KB and created a read only GMX.exe, the update came back, ignoring the 'hide' , and it overwrote my read only GMX.exe file as well.

This is a goddamn virus....

Member Avatar for CimmerianX

Oh - and i can confirm that Domain Members on win 7 are also seeing the update to win 10 icon.

Fuck you again MS.

Member Avatar for rproffitt

Woody Leonhard of "Ask Woody" fame had it happen to him.
http://www.askwoody.com/2016/windows-10-upgrade-starting-automatically-and-it-happened-to-me/
So the bottom line is that if you don't have GWX control panel in place and "never check for updates" set in WU, You're going to get W10.

There is a link in the article of Woody's about how to stop this insanity.

PS. Hey, I already moved what would move to 10 so for me, this is only to share what I'm seeing out there.

Member Avatar for Reverend Jim

@CimmerianX - try creating a simple exe that does nothing but exit. Then rename it gwx.exe and use it to replace the real gwx.exe. Then open a command shell as admin and cacls the stub to remove all access rights for everyone except our admin account. That might protect it from being overwritten. So far with running GWXControlPanel in monitor mode (and judicious screening and hiding of bad updates) I have mostly avoided Microsoft's latest virus. The one recent time that it got through I immediately restored an old disk image and upped my protection.

commented: Now at DefCon 2. +8
commented: This is a good idea. I marked it R.O. but did not acl the thing +9
Member Avatar for Reverend Jim

I'd rather play a nice game of chess.

commented: Player zero has entered the game. +0
Member Avatar for Littlemanz

I got sick of seeing the update icon so I upgraded about 5 months ago and must admit I like win10 it has the feel of win7 but better and cleaner.

Member Avatar for Reverend Jim

I actually went for the upgrade in early January (I am not a luddite) after taking a disk image (I am not an idiot). The one piece of software I absolutely will not do without (Equalizer APO) did not work so I reloaded the disk image. I may try again after the next app update. At least my machine is now registered with Micosoft so even if they do not extend the free period I should still be able to reinstall.

Member Avatar for Richard9898

Perhaps a bit off topic but I resent that with a Pentium 4 processor w/hyper-threading running at 3.4 ghz my system is too old to upgrade (I have plenty of RAM). Apparently I am missing a security proticol that was not built into the processor. The further irritation is the provided link to new computers I can buy - really!?! Another manifestation of a throwaway society.

Member Avatar for Reverend Jim

Sort of how you would feel if every time they resurfaced the roads you had to buy a new car.

Member Avatar for kc0arf

Hello All,

I have to wonder if in all the legalease crap we "agreed" to, even the stuff written in French, when the software was installed allowed Micro$oft a legal in to upgrade the machines with our implied consent.

All of the machines that I care about are on a corporate network, serviced by a WSUS server. It might boil down to overriding DNS to look at localhost 127.0.0.1 for .microsoft.com to prevent the download.

There is nothing wrong with "if it works, don't fix it". A computer is a machine, dammit, and if all I want it to do is perform in a certain fashion, then so be it.

Funny, my Macs and Linux machines work just fine and don't have these problems. Slowly converting people away from the Micro$oft madness.

Shall we talk licensing models, and CALs sometime?

Christian

Member Avatar for Reverend Jim

New Windows 10 blocker tool. See here

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.