'Windows 10 nagware: You can't click X. Make a date OR ELSE' According to a complaint from a reader, Microsoft’s Windows 10 nagware campaign has entered a new phase, with options to evade or escape an upgrade vanishing. Recently, Microsoft’s policy had been to throw up a dialogue box asking you whether you wanted to install Windows 10. If you clicked the red “X” to close the box – the …
i managed to kill GWX on a Windows 7 machine a while back... killed the process then uninstalled it in updates.. there are two or three updates that contain GWX, if you uninstall them and mark them never to be reinstalled, i think that keeps it at bay.
certainly not had any notifications pop up since.
re: Can't think of anything witty...
I've had many client machines magically unmark themselves and set that damn icon again - latest GWX Control Panel does a much better job now fyi.
Side story: Recently had reason to visit a local bank for a scanning issue (network, it's always network damnit) and they had Windows 10 Pro installed throughout their network. Quizzed their IT people about telemetry issues and they gave me blank stares... That's three banks I won't do business with due to security issues - almost afraid to look too deeply any more.
Not just Vista, Win7 as well, I found out last night that my parents PC popped this up LAST WEEK. They switched it off and havent used it since.
Then yesterday afternoon, IT SWITCHED ITSELF ON AND PERFORMED THE UPDATE!!
Luckily, an anti virus scan also occurred that stopped it rebooting (it stalled trying to read WindowsSystem32 folder), so there was time for me to talk mum through using Never10. Finally allowed it to reboot, and got the Win7 desktop.
I then talked her through disabling Win Update.
Vista is end of life, so is this upgrade mandatory because Vista itself is no longer supported?
Upgrades can only be mandatory in cases that require vendor support.
There's no-one stopping me from running VMS 5.4 on a MVAX 2000 (provided the bloody thing starts up in the first place), but I can't go calling Digital Compaq HP HPE when it bugchecks.
Never mind that it would be useless to call HPE anyway, given their appalling lack of knowledge regarding VMS.
First the (up|down|re)grade to 10 is scheduled, then you used to have some chance at cancelling it. If you successfully kill the process telling you what Microsoft have decided, it happens anyway when you are not watching.
(Warning: My last significant contact with Windows was in 1998, so get advice from someone else if you cannot switch to Linux.)
Dear Reg,
I'm getting more pestered by worried friends who look to me for help. Can somebody tell me the instructions to pass on to them, over the telephone, at the next scare-screen-of-doom?
Also, isn't it bang-to-rights illegal? Surely a government spokesman has something to say on swathes of the nation's infrastructure being hijacked, thousands of people being terrorised by these tentacles.
I reckon a good lawyer could do M$ (at least in the UK) under the Computer Misuse Act 1990.
Section 3 of said act seems to cover it for me
"A person is guilty of an offence if—
.(a)
he does any unauthorised act in relation to a computer;
...
"
(See http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1990/18/section/3)
The trouble is M$ can afford much, much, much better lawyers that the CPS.
Shitballs. Is that concrete that Vista is in the firing line? I have a manager's BYOD lappy that's on it (yeah, I know, don't start) and I don't have ready access to it to do preventative measures. I'll have to -- oh gods -- talk them through it on the phone! /dies a little inside
Is this authoritatively factual?
"Not wanting to support multiple OS", eh?
Yes, I can understand getting lots of dough in for scant work.
Meanwhile, Microsoft cannot even support multiple Offices. Install Skype for Business off an Exchange Online subscription with Office 2013 already on-PC? Nope!!.
"Stop, you should wait to install Office 2016. We'll have to remove the following if you continue: Microsoft Office Home and Business 2013 - en-us. This product doesn't work with Office 2016 right now. We're working on a solution. [Install Anyway] [I'll wait]"
That company so deserves to disappear.
"Stop, you should wait to install Office 2016. We'll have to remove the following if you continue: Microsoft Office Home and Business 2013 - en-us. This product doesn't work with Office 2016 right now. We're working on a solution. [Install Anyway] [I'll wait]"
I'm thinking of 2 terms. one involves a cluster. the other involves a circle.
I was curious so tried clicking the Windows 10 icon in the system tram on my old Asus netboot, currently running Windows 7 It refused to install due to a graphics driver incompatibility and suggest I contact Intel about it. Since that's the only computer running Windows in the house, apart from a works laptop with Win7 Enterprise on it, I'm happy :-)
Me two, I even tried it briefly. There were two things that led to it's removal:
1. It didn't play nice with Samba4:
8.1 was fine, 10, loooong delays (only after joining the domain), for e.g. typing hostnames into mstsc would freeze for 30s after each character typed into the host box... wtf does mstsc need AD for when a user is typing a hostname? Verify it's valid after I've typed the damned thing, not pause for 30s after each character.
2. Uncancellable "Get Updates" nags ignoring GPO
GPO was set to 'Notify but don't install' and 'Only notify administrators', the latter of which was ignored, nagging users with full-screen un-cancellable dialogs, often crashing full-screen 3D applications.
It's a small business, they're back on Win7 while I work out the specifics of the Linux migration. The only way that migration won't happen, is if MS remove all the forced updates/nagware and still give them a free upgrade to 10 now the deadline's past.
Best of luck for a smooth migration! Once your users realize they can get all their work done on a different OS, they'll never turn back. You'll see. If you have any holdouts, just give them a fresh Windows 8 laptop and wish them good luck on their forced upgrade path.
"Best of luck for a smooth migration!"
Hehe thanks. To be fair - it shouldn't be too troublesome, I've got 10-years of Linux under my belt, both desktop and server and they already use Firefox, LibreOffice and Thunderbird on Windows. Their entire backend is already Linux (Samba4 AD-DC).
They're a packaging firm, and MS Office is used for their label templates, I expect some pain there converting the documents to line up with the physical label sheets, but that should be the biggest hurdle.
Being a proper Linux geek, I see an excellent opportunity here to try to script this, extract the XML, find the margins, measure the difference, adjust accordingly, re-zip. :-)
They're a packaging firm, and MS Office is used for their label templates, I expect some pain there converting the documents to line up with the physical label sheets, but that should be the biggest hurdle.
glabel is surprisingly painless, open source, and contains most of the heavy lifting.
What's more disturbing is the updates keep crapping out as well. Not failing but leaving parts of the system broken. My network PVR 8.1 -> 10 upgrade went pretty well, drivers were replaced with bad ones as expected, the network took a while to come back but mostly it just worked after un-updating then hiding the drivers.
Last weekend's surprise (and forced while I was out) update installed the same blocked drivers, destroyed the firewall (?because I'd blocked most MS spyware and they were 'fixing' it) and generally raped my settings. Took more than half a day getting the damn machine back on the network and nearly working. And I know it will happen again if I don't completely cut it off from Microsoft servers :(
I have several friends who all work in different industries (Builder, Physio, Accountant) and they've all succumbed to this update. The only one who's business hasn't been affected is the Builder, both the Physio's booking system and the Accountants Sage software *spits* are borked now because of this upgrade.
The problem here is that all of these thought the upgrade was optional, and didn't mind paying for Windows 10 when they needed to upgrade. But they either hadn't the time or the money to do the upgrade. Now they're suffering because of, quite frankly, a horrible scam. Which is what it is, you click X to close a window not to install anything.
But they aren't the only ones to be burnt, they won't be the last either, but Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows they use. The trust in Microsoft for a lot of people in mission critical situations has been properly smashed with this debacle. Gate's baby is being sized up for it's coffin.
"So why did they not roll back the software if it affected them so badly? If I recall it explains quite clearly during the upgrade that you can do this and is quite simple to do."
I commented in reply to another recent Windows 10 article on this site - one person I know tried Windows 10 on his laptop, but decided he didn't like it so rolled it back to Windows 7 within the 30 days this is possible.
However, more recently he was a victim of the close icon trickery, and the laptop was shifted to Windows 10 again - and he says this time he can't find the option to roll it back.
"I was unaware that the rollback would not happen twice"
I'm not definitely saying it doesn't. Bear in mind, I'm talking about a non-technical user. It might simply be that he's just unable to find it - though having done it before, it's doubtful.
Another possibility is indeed that the option isn't presented the second time.
But it could also be that the installation date is stored somewhere (a Registry entry, perhaps) - and either piss poor programming, or deliberate twattishness on Microsoft's part might mean it isn't updated for the second time it's installed. So more than a month has passed since he *first* installed it, and the window has closed.
There could also be other explanations that I can't think of.
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