Can anyone give a non-biased, fact based report on what Microsoft tracks and sends to their servers on Windows 10? I've seen a lot of stories claiming that Windows 10 is free because it tracks just about everything, and sends it all to MS servers.
Doesn't that kind of make sense though? I just turned off Bing integration and the AV sending memory dumps makes sense if they want to improve detection.
In older versions of their AV solution you could choose what to send to Microsoft, down to even not sending where the File is located, just what it detected.
Turn off Bing integration and SearchUI.exe still attempts to make connections to Microsoft servers even though it should be operating completely locally.
I blocked it with my (third party) Firewall, which I shouldn't have to do.
> you need an edge device that deeply inspects each packet.
As cert pinning becomes more common, we are rapidly losing the ability to do this. The only work around I know of for iOS/Android is to jailbreak/root your device and get a debugger attached to apps. I haven't seen a workaround for getting around cert pinned Metro apps.
But do Linux distributions like Debian and OpenSuse send feedback to some server? I doubt there's enough of an organization to even care, let alone engineer that kind of infrastructure. Well, Suse and Redhat, maybe. Ubuntu, almost definitely. But Linux seems safer from prying eyes than the commercial OS's.
And they're still getting shit for it. The community tore them apart when it happened. The fact that they even considered such a thing means my distro recommendation is now permanently anything not Ubuntu/Ubuntu based.
It's an inevitability that people are going to make user-hostile Linux distros that take advantage of users ignorance, some already exist, but that shouldn't be a black mark on those distros that do it right and respect their users.
With BSDs and Linuxes at least, even those with desktop-integrated plugins that search 3rd parties, it's easy to disable everything you don't want/need.
> Depending upon your Windows Update settings, this may cause the upgrade process to automatically initiate on your device. Before the upgrade changes the OS of your device, you will be clearly prompted to choose whether or not to continue. And of course, if you choose to upgrade (our recommendation!), then you will have 31 days to roll back to your previous Windows version if you don’t love it.
If this were like any other Windows OS upgrade in the past, I'd be OK with this. But... it's not. It adds a lot of tracking, reporting, and some (currently innocuous) uncontrollable communication back to Microsoft. I guess it really is time to do the cost/benefit analysis of a single company collecting all of this information from my gaming rig.
You also lose Windows Media *Center, which some of us paid extra for so we could easily connect our Xbox 360 to our Windows PC without extra steps or ongoing fees.
While I do lament the loss of Media Center (it has some functions that while not commonly used, are still useful to some people) I've had luck with Plex for media stored on the local network to X360/Chromecast/etc. It works a lot better than the 360's alleged integration with WMC for certain.
This is without any ongoing fees but since it's a third party application, it does require the extra step of installing it. I never subscribed to their Plex Pass paid service but after installing the free Plex server and pointing it at my media directories on my desktop and NAS, it's worked great. The ability to transcode was particularly useful because the 360 wouldn't play some formats and it was easier to install Plex than to transcode them all.
Either way, this isn't meant to dismiss your legit complaint. Just hoping my experiences can be of use to you or others in the same situation. If you used WMC to handle OTA television viewing and recording, you may be better served by Kodi or some other application.
Unfortunately, I switched to an Xbox One and, last I checked, Plex required a rather high yearly fee to work with it. I think it was the Plex Pass you mentioned which came with a ton of features I didn't care about and would not use. All I wanted to do was stream from my PC to my Xbox One and I'd have paid a reasonable one time fee for a piece of software to do that. But not a high yearly fee for a package of services I have no need of. Not sure if it's changed since I looked.
Plex does not have DVR. I only use an antenna, so WMC is my only DVR. I paid extra to have a couple of computers be able to stream TV as well as the 360. Now I'm facing not having any of it work.
I guess I'll try MythTV after I can't run 8.1 pro.
Does it have to be different from Apple and Google's to be worth complaining about? The real competition here for a lot of users is against older versions of MS's own OSs.
Understandable, but for a lot of people (me at least) a large part of why we use Windows on one machine or another is because of what it offers over those other OSes.
I personally tend to use Windows because I can run it on just about any brand or model of x86 PC, it supports pretty much every component or peripheral I own, and it will run software not available for Linux.
So yeah, when something you make heavy use of adopts policies that you don't like, it's pretty common to discuss and criticize them. If nothing else, Microsoft (or any other company) would be wise to consider these complaints from users because they can easily impact their bottom line over time.
Whether you want to classify your thoughts as an appeal to popularity, or maybe as "moral equivalence", or some other sort of logical fallacy, it's still a logical fallacy. For one, it doesn't really matter who was first, it doesn't absolve Microsoft of anything. Morality or the right to privacy should not be relative concepts.
But related to your question - OS X does not leak data and comparing Windows with iOS or Android is comparing apples and oranges, as Windows is usually the desktop OS that has access to your company's VPN, your work and everything of importance, whereas a smartphone has at most access to your contacts, your calendar and your email. In other words sensitive, but not critical.
> comparing Windows with iOS or Android is comparing apples and oranges
This used to be true, a few years ago, but it isn't now.
Windows 10 is a mobile operating system that also runs on mobile phones. It has notifications and Cortana (from Windows Phone) and it integrates with online cloud storage (OneDrive). It's intended to be continuously updated and work with apps acrosss multiple platforms, including iOS and Android.
For me, the difference lies in that if I tell OSX "No", they respect that choice. For Windows 10, if I tell it "No", it interprets it as "It's OK for me to still send some things".
As for ChromeOS, you are aware of what you're getting into from the beginning. In contrast, it wasn't always this way with Windows.
Honestly regardless of whether Windows 10 is good or not I can't stand MS pushing this update down my throat.
I have a Windows 7 computer that I use mainly for gaming and having those notifications pop up randomly is infuriating, it behaves like some crappy adware that comes bundled with IE toolbars.
No option to turn it off either, you have to manually uninstall a bunch of updates if you want to get rid of it. And I almost believed the "but MS has changed" crowd. I really hope Valve manages to bring gaming on linux so that I never have to bother with this crappy OS anymore.
> I really hope Valve manages to bring gaming on linux
Not sure which games you play, but most of my favorites turned out to be available on Steam for Linux. I made the switch after W10's release and have hardly regretted it.
Any time I see an article claiming Microsoft's app store and XBox will wipe out Valve, I remind myself that it's not Microsoft's direct counters to Valve, it's Microsoft's sheer size that will create the openings Valve needs.
The OS group is undoing all the progress the XBox group has won.
What aggravates is that I uninstalled the update (and selected "ignore this update") which should have gotten rid of these prompts... and the next Windows update promptly re-installed it.
It was a stark reminder me how little control I have over my personal computers right now.
You have to turn off automatic updates, uninstall the update, refresh updates, tell it to hide the specific update so that it won't install. I believe at that point you can turn automatic updates back on.
That's the process I did to get rid of the nagging on three Win7 machines.
"Mistake my rear end!!! Microsoft got caught re-re-releasing KB3035583 and other related updates and now they're trying to walk back their outrageous and unethical behavior."
Not a lawyer so don't know, but it seems there is some rather underhanded approach to what they are doing here, and class actions seem to pop up for much less.
Sorry, nope. MS is fully up to date[1] on corporate best practices for circumventing class action suits and generally opting out of having to participate in the same legal system that governs individuals[2].
Hope you humans enjoyed your brief stint as the dominant organism on Earth! Thanks for playing!
Definitely check compatibility for games on Steam. The day I realized I could install the latest Civilization on Linux was the day I stopped dual-booting on my desktop.
They are shoving it down our collective throats because there is a very large cohort of completely oblivious users who would otherwise never consume the update. I can appreciate their desire to EoL Windows 7 and avoid another Windows XP, wherein they have to support an operating system for 15 years. Even RHEL only offers 10 years on their extended support.
Same reason Chrome updates automatically in the background without your consent. It's just less invasive, because it's only a browser.
Where I'm from, when someone needed some "learnin'" it usually didn't mean something fun and awesome to the person that needed a lesson. It has its uses.
This reminds me of college professors calling homework assignments "homeworks". Initially, these professors were all immigrants from India, but the usage spread during my years in grad school. I wonder if this is evidence of a cultural shift at Microsoft caused by hiring so many H1Bs or even influence from their tone-deaf CEO.
Currently getting some new hardware with support for VT-d/IOMMU to run Games and other heavily graphic applications in virtualized windows environments. (https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Multiheaded-NVIDI...). I really have to get rid of any microsoft software running directly on my hardware.
Good read. I looked into this a few years ago when I first started my switch to Linux but never convinced myself to buy a second video card. Now it might be worth a try again as I am loath to dual boot and therefore haven't touched any Windows-only games in a while.
I just installed a $79 OEM Windows 7 to an Intel NUC[1], and I have some questions about upgrading.
1. Why upgrade? Windows 7 seems like a good, stable OS that stays out of my way and lets me get work done. Newer versions have these funky tiles and touch interface, neither of which I want or can even use.
2. I've heard if I let my Win 7 install "important Windows updates", one of the updates is nagware to persuade me to update to Win10. Can that be turned off? Will it violate my privacy?
3. The article says you get up to 31 days to try Win10 and still be able to roll back to your previous OS. Why only 31 days? Why not 60? Why not 10,000? Does some irrevocable change occur to the hard disk after 31 days that renders it incapable of supporting Windows 7?
4. Will it cost money to update to 10 after next year? I'm not necessarily opposed to paying for an upgrade if it's worth it -- it's a product that they spent millions of dollars developing, after all -- but I don't like feeling pressured. I'm just barely getting settled in with Win7, after all!
5. Are there any reasons to stay away from 10? I've heard the anti-privacy scare stories. Anything else? E.g. NSA back doors, or removed support for interacting with Linux, or some such?
[1] (Originally I bought the NUC to be a quiet, compact Linux server/workstation, but unfortunately the i5 model can't seem to run any of the Linux distros I threw at it, whereas Windows installed flawlessly. My main desktop has become a Mac Mini, actually :)
[EDIT asterisks don't work :(]
1. If you have a decent SSD in it, W10 may be faster. It seems to run very well on SSDs.
4. Yes, for 1 year the upgrade is free. After that point you have to pay for the upgrade, just like to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8 you had to pay for an upgrade license.
5. Other than Microsoft's weird ideas on how they will push out updates that may affect your privacy it seems to work well enough in the industries I've tested it in. If you have any older 'expensive' software you may want to verify that it is compatible before migrating.
1. Windows 10 does offer a lot of performance improvements. Even if you don't like the new interface, under the hood it's much faster. Even Windows 8 was a lot faster.
2. I think there is an option to ignore individual updates. You could probably utilize that to get that to go away.
3. Windows 10 literally saves a copy of your whole system running Windows 7 on the hard disk. That is deleted after 31 days.
4. They claim that it will begin to cost money to upgrade starting next year. Whether or not that becomes reality could go either way. My guess is that yes, it will cost money just like a new Windows 10 build costs money now.
5. You can turn off a good portion of the privacy-invading settings, but it's still fairly invasive. Microsoft as a company has actually been ramping up their support for other platforms which is kind of cool. I haven't heard about any specific back doors in the Windows OS itself, but that doesn't mean they aren't there. The OS is closed source, so it's really anyone's guess.
"Updates that have been hidden can appear again if a new version of the same update is released. That’s the case with KB 3035583; not only has it received an update (thus unhiding it), it’s status as an ‘Optional’ update has been changed to ‘Important’."
This announcement today seems like they'll do it again, even stronger, with revenge.
"Early next year, we expect to be re-categorizing Windows 10 as a “Recommended Update”. Depending upon your Windows Update settings, this may cause the upgrade process to automatically initiate on your device"
Windows 10 strikes back.
> 3. Windows 10 literally saves a copy of your whole system running Windows 7 on the hard disk
Good to know about both of those. It's fairly ironic that it uses up a significant portion of disk space for a "safe" copy of the original OS that doesn't actually work..
> 1. Windows 10 does offer a lot of performance improvements. Even if you don't like the new interface, under the hood it's much faster. Even Windows 8 was a lot faster.
YMMV. For me, Win10 totally destabilized a netbook that was previously running smoothly on Win7. And for some reason, the backlight control worked under 7 but not 10, locking the screen at a battery-draining 100% brightness. Wasted an hour or two on the phone with Microsoft just to learn that they have no idea of the cause or solution, despite web searches turning up plenty of reports of this issue. At least the revert function worked.
edit: Uh, yikes, apparently even that's a bit broken.
> the Windows OS itself, but that doesn't mean they aren't there. The OS is closed source, so it's really anyone's guess.
Windows is closed source but many thousands of people have actually read the code. This includes numerous governments (including the Russian government), US organizations, large companies, universities, and even amateurs (Microsoft MVPs).
You will need a good reason. I don't think "I want to look for backdoors" will work. They might point out that plenty of other people have already done that ;-)
In regards to your first question, Win 7 _is_ pretty great. Windows 8 is more the OS with the funky tiles and touch interface and 10 is the answer to those complaints. It has some of that still, but it's a nice hybrid of the features we saw in 7 and the features of 8. For me at least, 10 fixed all of the problems I had with 8.
For the 31 days thing, I strongly suspect it's mostly just a marketing thing. "Try the newest Windows out for 31 days, risk free!". I could see it being an issue of storage on tablet devices with minimal storage or laptop/desktops with similar issues.
I've since wiped out my Win10 machine (by accident...oops) and went back to 8, since that's what I had a license and disc for. Not sure if I'll go back to 10. The privacy issues concern me greatly.
Re: the privacy, didn't they put these in 7/8 anyway? I swear I saw some things about them doing that in an update. Perhaps it was just something they were thinking about?
I use 10 at work, honestly it's not bad. I haven't upgraded on my home machines though...
1) I personally really enjoy the UI of windows 10. I have windows 7 at work. I had a windows 8 machine for a year or so. But Windows 10 is the best of both 7 and 8 to me. The touch interface is good. The shortcuts are great, and they have re-introduced a start like menu.
3) OK I'll guess at this one. Space. If they are retaining a bunch of information it may take up a significant amount of space they can free by getting rid of it. But I don't know for sure. It might just be that 31 days is a standard tech return policy period and they can.
2/4) I think you can turn the notifications off. And if you are going to learn a new OS it makes sense to learn the one that you are going to be moving to no the one you are going to be moving from. http://winsupersite.com/windows-10/disabling-windows-10-upgr...
5) This is opinion and people disliking the new direction of Microsoft. You get new features (Like Cortana) but it costs you in privacy. How much is that cost? Only Microsoft really knows... But you can always set up a dual boot or something to address some of those issues. MANY Linux distros are almost easier to get used to than Windows 10 (from windows 7). And win 10 even stole some features from them.
<soapbox>
I just want to let everyone know that anything you post here (on the internet) is already being gobbled up by the NSA, just about anything you do on your phone, and now anything you do on your pc (presumably). Lets focus on changing the law, because Linux is not a viable solution for 99% (that stat is made up) of people, which means that your parents, friends, and everyone else aren't protected even if you are.
While changing the law is ridiculously hard, if you are concerned about privacy mention it to friends and family so they know and evangelize. Microsoft is no more evil than anyone else. I presonally think that at their core they don't want to give this data to the NSA, they want it to figure out how users are using the OS (what every dev wants). So they've tooled it to the Nth degree and it's only a privacy issue because they aren't clear what they collect (but they let you turn it off) and we don't trust them to let us turn it off.
</soapbox>
" I presonally think that at their core they don't want to give this data to the NSA"
A philosophy teacher once told me "you are not what you think, but you are what you say and what you do".
Nobody cares what they or don't want, it's what they do that counts. And what they do is not pretty, in fact in think it's despicable.
And I'm not "one of those Linux guys". I'm a C# dev that would be perfectly fine with Microsoft products as they are now if they didn't fuck their efforts with "telemetry" updates.
I'm trying 3 Linux distro this week-end to see the one I can live with.
Q2: You can. Hiding the update that contains the nagware worked for me[1]. You should allow windows to install other updates (fixing bugs, security risks, ect.).
Q3: The 31 day deadline is to free-up space once a user has settled down with Win10. Advanced users can work around this [2].
I can’t answer all these questions unfortunately! Q1 and Q5 are fairly subjective - I think it's up to you to form your own opinion on those.
Now, what to do regarding Windows 10 ? If you're a fairly computer savvy person, for home usage, I'll say disable the updates, get an AV and a firewall and keep a weekly backup.
Updates loose any credibility if the vendor issuing them cannot be trusted and MS has shown with those tactics what the endgame is. Checking every update what it does and if it's safe to apply to the system takes more time and energy then keeping a weekly backup of the system and basic security. Now why should someone play hide and seek with MS and their dark patterns instead of using the system as is ?
I'd say that this is a pretty sad state of OS updates we're in regarding Windows, if not software generally.
You have a very good point about disabling updates. Everyone here seems to think that OS updates are vital-important, but they are not. If you are running latest browser, instant messenger and personal firewall, you are unlikely to catch malware online regardless of OS patches installed.
So, Windows 10 actually does not complete against Linux or PC-BSD, it completes against previous versions of Windows without telemetry crap, i.e. Windows 7 and Vista. Exactly these operating systems with disabled updates will dominate for the next 20 years, not Linux or BSD.
Btw, this approach (disabling updates) also solves all well known problems with long time reboots, metered internet connections, tray nags about Windows 10, insufficient disk space to save old OS etc.
I got by using xp on a quite old machine from 2007 to 2015 by disabling updates and using a firewall. I think many will do similar things with windows 7.
Funny you mention pc-bsd. I lost the boot sector (perhaps) on my ssd in my win7 machine so this weekend I installed pc-bsd on the 'broken' ssd. During the install I was given a warning that something in my uefi was funny. Windows just failed to install with errors and no help to be found on the install cd (retail version).
So...I'm currently, as of 24 hours ago, using pc-bsd. I can't see most people going for it though. The kde desktop uninstalled itself randomly so I ended up installing gnome desktop and am using the classic version of gnome. It's going well now though. Actually really well, but I keep waiting for something bad to happen. If it behaves for a bit longer I might just switch.
There's an evil side to microsoft that I wouldn't miss but I do already miss liking microsoft. I've used them for a really long time. There's a lot of good design and engineering in there.
What sort of problems did you run into when installing linux? I have an i5 model that runs OS X. I would think installing Ubuntu via bootable USB would more or less like installing Windows.
This may explain how they accidentally turned the auto update on a few months ago (that ended up forcing a few people to upgrade to 10). They were probably changing this from an Upgrade to an Update and it got out into the wild.
My sister upgraded to Windows 10 and was greeted by a blue screen every time she tried to turn on the computer. Investigating online it seems it's some kind of BIOS incompatibility but the manufacturer (Packard Bell, doesn't operate in USA but it's relatively well known in Spain) doesn't provide BIOS updates for that model. So we restored Windows 7 and lost an entire day. I'm sure she's going to be very happy when she sees the Windows 10 nag again.
Interesting, my brothers neighbour had the same error on his 1 year old Lenovo. When he started mentioning Windows 10 before the laptop crapped out, I just advised him to go to the shop support and ask them if they will disable the notification when PC is reinstalled.
"Early next year, we expect to be re-categorizing Windows 10 as a “Recommended Update”. Depending upon your Windows Update settings, this may cause the upgrade process to automatically initiate on your device."
I've never been as frustrated with a windows update as this one. First, I've a small machine with SSD that I use as media center running windows 7, this humongous download (which happened overnight without any consent) killed that machine. Since then I've it switched to linux and things are much better.
Second I know an elderly couple who doesn't know much about computers. When they got the prompt for upgrade, they didn't even think it was an operating system upgrade. They thought it was another windows update. Next morning they couldn't do anything as the start button wouldn't work, printers were gone, email settings were gone, critical error message when they click edge etc. Now for a tech savvy person, it wouldn't be a problem and you can easily fix these but they live far from city, like about a good 2 hour drive. Since I'm closest to them, this weekend I'll be making a trip there and fixing it wasting around 6-7 hours of my life just because of windows 10. Thanks Microsoft!
It worked perfectly and only took about 30 minutes. And the man uses his computer for a lot of stuff - personal bookkeeping, Word, Excel, Publisher, electronic document management, etc etc etc - and it's all 100% back to normal.
>> personal bookkeeping, Word, Excel, Publisher, electronic document management, etc etc etc - and it's all 100% back to normal.
Microsoft are turning their back on a group of people who used to pay money upfront for premium products. How many of these users want a subscription service? Maybe they want a finished OS with high quality software pre-installed instead of some crappy app store.
> I've never been as frustrated with a windows update as this one. First, I've a small machine with SSD that I use as media center running windows 7, this humongous download (which happened overnight without any consent) killed that machine. Since then I've it switched to linux and things are much better.
Opposite problem with a notebook computer that my friend put Windows 8 on had a small ssd C drive and a big hard disk D drive. The prompt saying get ready for Windows 10 never showed up because the SSD didn't have enough space in it.
Losing settings shouldn't happen. Honestly, I'd have pushed harder requiring people to start fresh for those who want Windows 10.
I'd put (time-triggered?) big warning signs saying that Windows 7 ended mainstream support on January 14, 2020 and Windows 8 will end mainstream support on January 10, 2023 and that you should not use these products after this date unless you really know what you are doing. We are still more than four years away from that date though.
It would make a lot more sense to me for Microsoft to offer Windows 10 for free for a short time to everyone and say that regular prices will resume after this amnesty period.
The way they are putting Window 10 in Windows Update, it makes it seem like Windows 10 is a regular update to Windows. I don't understand this. I wanted to upgrade to Windows 10. The first thing I did when I got Windows 10 was to reset my computer. I am very happy to be able to say that I was able to reset my computer without an external drive. The process took less than two hours and didn't require me to enter a product key. (ymmv of course)
Maybe it is I who has changed and gotten busy/careless but this is the first time that I have gone to just using the computer and not really caring about Windows Update.
Google's Chromebooks did a lot to change my attitude towards computers.
I still obsess a little over some details like what is so important that is Onedrive writing constantly to C:\Users\[redacted]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneDrive\logs\Personal\TraceCurrent.6201.1019.etl at about 30000 Bps or why OneDrive seems to be constantly uploading things to a-0011.a-smedge.net at about 7 million bytes per second while reporting not nearly enough corresponding disk activity.
There is not much literature about this and the best I could find with a five second Google search was "TraceArchive.ETL and TraceCurrent.ETL are logging files which appear to contain the remnants of the smart folder feature in Windows 8.1." http://www.champlain.edu/Documents/LCDI/Windows%2010%20Foren... I guess I will attribute it to incompetence until I see some evidence of malevolence.
I guess tl;dr I agree with you. Upgrade to Windows 10 should not happen automatically. It should be a choice that the user (or device administrator) seeks.
On a related note: with Linux as my daily driver, I don't understand how the average Windows user deals with Microsoft's implementation of automatic updates.
Say I just woke up, and I'm in a rush to boot up my computer, print out a paper, and get out the door. But--surprise! Windows Update ran in the background the night before, and now system startup is delayed half an hour or more to configure a new batch of patches.
On the one hand, from a security standpoint, I appreciate that the default is to keep users' systems up-to-date. On the other, it seems that Microsoft pushes this with little regard for their users' time or comfort.
Unless you get up for work on Wednesday (Tuesday?) night at 3am you're fine.
>now system startup is delayed half an hour or more to configure a new batch of patches.
The default is that there is no configuration. The OS downloads the patches by default, installs them, then waits for the user to restart the computer to finalize things. The user can simply not restart the computer if they are in a hurry.
I'm talking about a cold boot here. As in: (1) the OS downloads and installs patches (2) at some point I turn off my computer for the night (3) I turn it on again in the morning and have to wait for this finalization before I can use my system.
This can occasionally be an issue for people unaware of the update schedule - I agree.
A small learning curve of "reset before turning off for the night on Tuesdays" alleviates that problem and I feel Microsoft made that trade off for user security with their general user (read: non-tech savvy people) as the primary users.
Personally I have automatic updates turned off and vet which patches get installed. But I'm more involved than the typical Windows users. I'd use a Linux distro if I could find suitable replacements for certain programs I rely on for my workflow.
> This can occasionally be an issue for people unaware of the update schedule - I agree.
> A small learning curve of "reset before turning off for the night on Tuesdays" alleviates that problem...
No. The problem remains. This just time-shifts the problem.
In recent memory, I've had two Patch Tuesdays that sent Windows into a 5+ deep post-boot-but-pre-login reboot loop while Windows tried to figure out how to apply several patches that would just not apply. (Spoiler alert: It never figured out how, but just -eventually- gave up.)
It doesn't matter what technical decisions and constraints lead to this post-boot-but-pre-login configuration process being the way things work, it's still awful.
Every Linux distro I use seems to have figured out how to apply and configure updates before you reboot a system, rather than during the next boot cycle.
>No. The problem remains. This just time-shifts the problem.
The time was the problem in the example, so time-shifting is a legitimate fix to the problem here. "In a rush for work, turn on computer, 30 minutes of updates." was the problem.
>Every Linux distro I use seems to have figured out how to apply and configure updates before you reboot a system, rather than during the next boot cycle.
There are tradeoffs for doing things that way. Such as when everything eats shit and you regret updating.
> There are tradeoffs for doing things that way. Such as when everything eats shit and you regret updating.
For example:
pacman -Syu
Knowing that you're on a rolling release distro is one thing, but being used to a "LTS" system (Windows 7,8x) then "upgrading" to a rolling release (Windows 10) is something else.
The trust in MS for being capable and responsible for handling the updates is broken.
> There are tradeoffs for doing things that way. Such as when everything eats shit and you regret updating.
Bad updates are bad updates, regardless of whether you do the configuration after a reboot (rendering the computer useless while you configure), or while the system is still running.
Not that it matters, but I've had far more bad updates on my Windows systems than I have on any of my Linux systems. :)
> ...time-shifting is a legitimate fix to the problem here.
It's not a fix. It's a band-aid that fails to address the root of the problem.
Yeah it can! Try pacman -Syyu instead. Oh yeah be sure to read what's changing. Arch user since the early days, never had an issue I couldn't fix in minutes. Rule #1 read.
You can have automatic updates without the Windows style problem you describe. The bigger problem is that Windows updates require taking the system offline for a significant amount of time; as apposed to configuring the updates while the unupdated system is running, then applying them with nothing more than a normal reboot.
> I appreciate that the default is to keep users' systems up-to-date.
By catering to both the masses and the experts, MS is caught between a rock and a hard place. Forced, automatic updates are extremely irritating. But, without them, the vast majority of Windows users would never update anything. Never. Windows would have a much worse reputation for security because tens of millions of users would be getting regularly owned by hacks that were patched 8 years ago.
Something in between is possible. If you were to get annoying popups that you had to dismiss daily until you updated your system, most people would just click OK and deal with it. Unless they were in a hurry, as suggested by the parent.
That's what they tried for the previous decade. The only thing which happened was training users to either click cancel without reading or figure out how to disable updates.
The thing is, Microsoft's updates shouldn't be these all-encompassing, UI-destroying messes. They should be sensible, useful, smaller updates. If there is any component that stands in the way of small, easy updates, a better-designed component should be created and made available as a free, opt-in update (e.g. state that the older version is unsupported and that all major updates will only occur in the new-better-designed-incrementally-updated design).
Indeed, Windows 10 is "Windows as a Service", which does exactly that: it provides continuous mostly-small updates, so there's never another "big bang" update. Also, these free updates mean never having to pay for a big one.
Obviously people are bitching like mad about this. Some of the most vocal seem to resent every change in Windows since XP SP2.
People are also bitching about telemetry, even though both the success of new upgrades depends on it, and even though all this anonymous data is actually driving Windows 10's development (in the same way that it drives Gmail, Facebook etc).
I guess it's a fact of life that if you have 1.5 billion users, then the odd hundred million or so will find something to bitch about, whatever Microsoft does....
Not quite sure precisely what you're trying to describe with the 'as a Service' thing here.
Purchasing options include (though are not limited) methods comparable to previous Win versions, and it runs on hardware I own and am sitting in front of. The aaS appellation is often needlessly overloaded, I find.
> which does exactly that: it provides continuous mostly-small
> updates, so there's never another "big bang" update. Also,
> these free updates mean never having to pay for a big one.
Okay, so make a small adjustment to the parent(s), and think of their complaint/observation more like 'If you're going to transition users to a new golden era where every time you turn your computer on you have fast boot times (and a ten minute wait for updates to process), then don't make the transition such a brutally painfully experience - it reduces our trust in them as a vendor that they can actually deliver on promises of constant update golden eras'.
Or something like that.
> Some of the most vocal seem to resent every change in
> Windows since XP SP2.
For many (perhaps most?) Microsoft platform users, all of what they require of their computer could still be done just fine with Windows XP SP2. As an aside, it's lovely that you mention specifically SP2 - so obviously a part of a previous 'continuous mostly small update' process that you imply we won't have until we embrace Windows 10. Anyway, all the intervening updates have for many people been a combination of frustration, time, and money misspent, with little practical gain.
> People are also bitching about telemetry, even though
> both the success of new upgrades depends on it, and
> even though all this anonymous data is actually driving
> Windows 10's development (in the same way that it drives
> Gmail, Facebook etc).
I am not one such bitchee, but I can understand the concerns. And if an operating system's success depends on knowing where I am, it's doing something wrong (all my other operating systems, current, and historic, have been successfully used by me without access to these data).
And, really, it should not be funding / driving development the same way some service providers acquire personal data and then market it on your behalf.
> Not quite sure precisely what you're trying to describe with the 'as a Service' thing here.
The long-term idea is to have Windows delivered as a service like, say, a Chromebook. Or Gmail.
> you mention specifically SP2 - so obviously a part of a previous 'continuous mostly small update' process
Except it wasn't. SP2 involved a massive rewrite and was a significant upgrade. It could almost have been shipped as a new version of the OS, though it would have been somewhat unfair to charge for delivering what XP buyers should have had in the first place.
Anyway, XP SP2 was and still is worse than Vista SP1 or Windows 7 in all sorts of important ways. Sure, people could still use it (some are), but you could say the same about DOS 3.3. It just depends how many years of innovation and improvement you want to do without.
> And if an operating system's success depends on knowing where I am, it's doing something wrong (all my other operating systems, current, and historic, have been successfully used by me without access to these data).
It's one of the things that today's internet-aware mobile operating systems like to know. It's obviously more important when Windows 10 is running on a phone or a small tablet. It's generally not important on a desktop, but almost the whole web is using geolocation and cookies to track your location anyway, whether you like it or not.
> And, really, it should not be funding / driving development the same way some service providers acquire personal data and then market it on your behalf.
Location isn't driving development, but anonymized telemetry is. Indeed, it has done for some time, even if it was just feedback from Windows Update, or the rises/falls of popularity of certain software.
It has nothing to do with "marketing personal data". In fact, unlike Google, Microsoft doesn't even sell ads against the contents of your online emails.
> The long-term idea is to have Windows delivered as a
> service like, say, a Chromebook. Or Gmail.
Okay, I think you're conflating service with rolling updates.
> Except it wasn't. SP2 involved a massive rewrite and was a
> significant upgrade. It could almost have been shipped as a
> new version of the OS, though it would have been somewhat
> unfair to charge for delivering what XP buyers should have
> had in the first place.
My point is that if you ask someone using Win7 or Win8 today what the advantages of that OS is over, say, Vista or XP, they probably can't provide any. Or, from a different angle, if they can think of anything that they can do on their current platforms that they couldn't do on the previous one.
I know the improvements exist (I've been sys-admining on/off since the early 1990's) but _for most people_ the functionality they had since, say, XP (or perhaps even earlier) is pretty much what they are using now. Web mostly, some office document manipulation, occasional printing, games.
> Sure, people could still use it [XP] (some are), but you
> could say the same about DOS 3.3. It just depends how
> many years of innovation and improvement you want to do
> without.
I don't know anyone still using DOS 3.3, and indeed the user experience of trying to crank up a web browser on that OS would be truly horrendous.
On the other hand I know LOTS of people still using XP. Government agencies and large commercials, mostly, but both are typically cited as the more important consumer demographic for Microsoft operating system.
(Plus pretty much every ATM on the planet, IIRC.)
> It's one of the things that today's internet-aware
> mobile operating systems like to know. It's obviously
> more important when Windows 10 is running on a phone
> or a small tablet. It's generally not important on a
> desktop, but almost the whole web is using geolocation
> and cookies to track your location anyway, whether you
> like it or not.
My desktop, as you observe, is not a mobile operating system. And I have been particularly happy with my OS not knowing where I live for a long time - but that's just one point of data, I accept. Nonetheless, selling an update on the proposition that the new version has superior capabilities for tracking you isn't compelling (for most people, once you explain it to them).
The 'whether I like it or not' ... is also not a good way of convincing someone of the merits of gratuitous change. : )
> Okay, I think you're conflating service with rolling updates.
Or maybe you are? ;-)
> My point is that if you ask someone using Win7 or Win8 today what the advantages of that OS is over, say, Vista or XP, they probably can't provide any. Or, from a different angle, if they can think of anything that they can do on their current platforms that they couldn't do on the previous one.
I don't really see the point of your point. You might as well say that if you only need to drive half a mile to the shops, then a Model T Ford would do the job. True, but not every Windows user is stuck in the past.
Later versions of Windows handle memory and resources better, so they are smoother in operation, don't need frequent reboots etc, and they're also more secure. The time savings alone are more than enough to cover the cost of upgrading.
UEFI machines also boot and resume much quicker, which most people would notice.
There's a whole class of new lightweight sandboxed apps. There's a whole new Windows Store. There's better voice and handwriting recognition. There's massively better stylus support, which is being exploited in things like the Surface Pro.
> Plus pretty much every ATM on the planet, IIRC.
But not the desktop version....
> My desktop, as you observe, is not a mobile operating system.
Sure, but desktops are not exactly at the cutting edge in a world that is going mobile.
The point of Windows 10 is that it's a converged operating system that runs on mobile phones, tablets, and games consoles, with "universal apps" that are adaptable to all three platforms. Windows 10 will also run on everything from USB sticks to high-end workstations.
> And I have been particularly happy with my OS not knowing where I live for a long time
Exactly how does Windows 10 know where you live more than XP knew where you lived?
> the new version has superior capabilities for tracking you isn't compelling (for most people, once you explain it to them).
The tracking isn't any different from what was already in Windows 8/8.1 except for Cortana, which can be turned off. (And is turned off by default.)
It's not something a sensible person would worry about unless they've stopped using a smartphone and already take extensive anti-tracking measures while on the web. Microsoft is only doing a small fraction of the tracking that's done by Google and Google Android.
Oh, you should also stop using bank cards, and loyalty cards, and avoid shops because they have CCTV cameras. And you can't own or drive a car because of numberplate recognition. This is the serious stuff. Even then, you'll probably be tracked by the US government, regardless of whether or not you live in the USA....
You set updates to download automatically but not install. It's one of the options. Then you get alerted of updates and can install them when convenient. You get a small notification on the login screen.
Exactly. Startup or wake-up is the worst possible time to start a bunch of new processes because it is the one time that the user has explicitly told you that they want to start using their device immediately. Virtually any other time -- even a RANDOMLY chosen time -- would be less likely to be in the user's way!
Microsoft is far from the only offender of course (a PlayStation comes to mind, for example) but system designers really need to start using their brains on this.
I think this is a side effect of the use of CBS since Vista. Back in the update.exe days, there was no database to maintain and most of the work was done in update.exe including adding a list of files to change on reboot into the registry, as well as adding registry entries for the updates installed. It was a fairly simple system. CBS now uses a database to keep track of updates that needs to be updated on reboot and is much more complex. Win10 actually improves the situation BTW by using single cumulative updates instead of multiple updates for each patch Tuesday.
I got tired of these 30 minute updates on my mom's computer and installed Linux along side windows. I changed the theme to somewhat look like Windows and she loves it. No more annoying updates.
It's hilarious because when my stepdad has a problem with his windows computer my mom tells him maybe he should install Linux. Not that Linux is some magic OS that fixes every problem but I do think it has come a long was is now much more user friendly than Windows is now.
Thanks. Still, automatic updates can't be disabled on the Home edition of Windows 10. So much for "We understand you care deeply." They understand, but they don't want to let you. At least not without paying them premium.
I think they're just saying that the option is there with those who have metered connections in mind. IIRC, 8.1 had a few settings for metered connections though.
After about three days I found out this was cause by me changing the location of the users Document and Setting folder, using the Location option as provided by Windows 10 itself.
To cut a long story short, DON'T TOUCH the location of that folder as it will break lots of things in Windows 10.
Also Windows 10 puts a new GUI layer over everything, so of course all your years of Windows knowledge is lost.
And here's another example of why that is just stupid.
There is a new GUI to create new user accounts and it is very easy to create new accounts, that is until the button stops working. You click on the button but nothing happens. No message, no nothing.
So when that happens what do you do?
You spend another two days searching, only to find the solution is to bypass the Windows 10 GUI and hit the old Windows layer using this bit of magic:
Open command prompt in Admin mode
control userpassword2
Running that command gives you the old Windows 7 user management dialog.
Finally, Windows 10 seems to have an annoying intermittent habit of not understanding focus and z-order.
You click on a button and nothing happens.
You click on the button again and nothing happens.
You click on the button a third time and this time you notice the task bar flicker, only to find you have three new instances all hiding behind the current application.
That seems to happen a lot in the Settings panels.
And here is another issue that has just started to occur on a rather annoying, regular basis. Right click on the task bar, hoping to bring up a menu so you can select the task manager to kill an errant application.
Instead you get a pop up menu that display, each menu item but without any text. So you get a popup menu a few millimetres in width.
Needless to say it is a useless, unusable popup menu, but luckily a reboot does fix the issue.
Who charges more for Win10 when 7/8 gives you 10 for free? Doesn't the free upgrade apply if you buy 7 today?
Also: I have seen zero things I like less in Win10 than Win8.1 (save maybe for the privacy things). Can't imagine what they would be? Win7 was great, Win10 is (almost) what Win8 should have been if they had finished it before shipping.
Not discounting your experiences but I've upgraded several computers from 7/8x to 10 and had few to no issues. On my one laptop I think it originally tried to install the wrong touchpad driver through Windows Update but I solved this by disabling that update, reinstalling the correct driver, and then a week later, Windows Update sent me a newer version of the correct driver so it looks like that was fixed.
The only real annoyance I had was that for each upgrade (I think I upgraded 5 PCs) I initially had to adjust a few settings where I had preferences other than the default (disable search bar, disable web results in search, make Explorer open on "This PC" instead of recent/frequent apps, disable OneDrive since I don't use it). Pretty annoying but takes 5 minutes and only needed to do it upon initial upgrade.
Not saying these are positive things at all but I'm a realist and I've never installed an OS or major upgrade where I didn't have to spend 5-10 minutes setting things up "my way" on first boot.
Otherwise, no BSODs, no broken applications, and a bit quicker and up to date than 7/8x. If anything, I was pleasantly surprised that an in-place Windows upgrade actually worked on all of my machines. In the past I always did clean installs but figured the free upgrade was enough incentive to give it a shot. If it didn't work, I could always clean install afterward but haven't had to.
> At any time during the first 31 days, you can go to “Settings->Update and Security->Recovery and Uninstall Windows 10” to return to your prior version of Windows.
My computer didn't work with Windows 10, contrary to their claim that it would. The drivers I had on the notebook are "too old" and Intel doesn't support the devices for Windows 8 or 10 but MSFT claimed in their "Update to 10" nagware that it would work. It doesn't. I've discovered that only after two days of the immense number of the restarts of Windows 10, searching for the possible causes and finding the posts related to my hardware on the web forums.
And after I returned to Windows 7, it still presents "Upgrade to Windows 10" and to decline I had to uninstall more updates and put some registry entries which I had to search on the web (1). Far from easy to just say "it doesn't work please don't bother me or make the goddamn drivers."
Oh, and the return to Windows 7 from 10 actually didn't work too -- it screwed all the scheduled tasks (which were a part of the Windows 7 installation, not the tasks I've made!) (2)
---
1) This comment seemed to be the most useful: "This is totally unethical, namely re-releasing KB3035583 after hundreds of thousands of people paid technicians to have these removed."
If they really wanted to make it easy to update, they could offer a downloadable installer image that installs cleanly with any Windows 7-10 license key. And by downloadable I mean an ISO image on a website, not through a "media creation tool" that requires the same operating system.
It's much easier to install/update some Linux distributions, and I don't think that's in their best interest.
My recommendation is to completely avoid Windows 10, unless you are a heavy PC gamer. In which case you'll need it eventually for DirectX 12.
If you are a PC gamer then install Windows 10 and use only a local account, disable all of its cloud integration, disable all the telemetry and logging and use a third party firewall to block anything else that the OS options do not let you disable.
Then use another machine with another operating system like Linux that doesn't behave like it owns you and your entire system, for all your other personal/professional computing needs.
I'll end up on W10 as it seems inevitable. Mostly I want it as a VMware "KVM mode" (fullscreen, takes over all input) host, due to Windows having better driver, power, and suspend/resume support. I'd love to run VMware directly on Linux but don't like the idea of dicking with drivers for even two hours.
Oh come off of it. I have installed Linux on dozens of different hardware SKUs in the last three years and never spent a second thinking about drivers other than whether to install xf86-video-intel or xf86-video-ati
Besides, you can choose your hardware for both battery life and linux hardware compatibility.
Both my Chromebook Pixel 2015 and Thinkpad Carbon X1 (3rd gen) have equal Linux/Windows battery life. The Pixel regularly lasts 6 hours even when doing dev work. Runs windows perfectly under libvirtd.
It's so strange and annoying to keep hearing these 10 year old Linux memes repeated all the damn time.
If you want to get rid of the prompt and the upgrade, remove update KB3035583. You'll also want to hide it by right clicking the update and selecting "Hide Update" from within the available updates dialog area. This will stop Windows Update from installing it over and over and over again. Which it will do if you don't hide it.
Also, it looks like for those like myself that have done this, it now appears to be a stand alone update with no KB identifier. You can do the same thing to this update; just Hide it! This work around will probably be overridden by some future update, but it will give you temporary respite from this windows 10 upgropalypse.
It makes no odds. The most egregious intrusion of Windows 10, the wonderful keylogger 'diagtrack.dll' has been backported to 8.1 and 7 and installs under different than advertised Microsoft KB updates.
Upgraded all windows machines to Windows 10. I'm so happy now. Much better. People that say "i moved to linux", we all did this at a point in time But like all Apple users, "I don't have time to troubleshoot, I need to get things done". Windows 10 did this for me till now. Everything works out of the box, no problem.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadOh great! Can't wait to get a million phone calls about this one.
There was not even a option to send Memory Dumps.
Now its all or nothing.
I blocked it with my (third party) Firewall, which I shouldn't have to do.
Both error reporting and Windows Defender asked you if you want to upload additional information (e.g. memory dumps).
As cert pinning becomes more common, we are rapidly losing the ability to do this. The only work around I know of for iOS/Android is to jailbreak/root your device and get a debugger attached to apps. I haven't seen a workaround for getting around cert pinned Metro apps.
It's an inevitability that people are going to make user-hostile Linux distros that take advantage of users ignorance, some already exist, but that shouldn't be a black mark on those distros that do it right and respect their users.
Not with many GNU/Linux distributions or the BSDs.
With BSDs and Linuxes at least, even those with desktop-integrated plugins that search 3rd parties, it's easy to disable everything you don't want/need.
Anyone knows if this is complete?
It's in Czech, but packet dumps are language-agnostic and comments can be translated using, say, Google Translate, reasonably accurately.
> Depending upon your Windows Update settings, this may cause the upgrade process to automatically initiate on your device. Before the upgrade changes the OS of your device, you will be clearly prompted to choose whether or not to continue. And of course, if you choose to upgrade (our recommendation!), then you will have 31 days to roll back to your previous Windows version if you don’t love it.
As far as I remember, in gwx there was no such option as "no, thank you, I will keep my current OS".
If this were like any other Windows OS upgrade in the past, I'd be OK with this. But... it's not. It adds a lot of tracking, reporting, and some (currently innocuous) uncontrollable communication back to Microsoft. I guess it really is time to do the cost/benefit analysis of a single company collecting all of this information from my gaming rig.
</horse>
This is without any ongoing fees but since it's a third party application, it does require the extra step of installing it. I never subscribed to their Plex Pass paid service but after installing the free Plex server and pointing it at my media directories on my desktop and NAS, it's worked great. The ability to transcode was particularly useful because the 360 wouldn't play some formats and it was easier to install Plex than to transcode them all.
Either way, this isn't meant to dismiss your legit complaint. Just hoping my experiences can be of use to you or others in the same situation. If you used WMC to handle OTA television viewing and recording, you may be better served by Kodi or some other application.
I guess I'll try MythTV after I can't run 8.1 pro.
I personally tend to use Windows because I can run it on just about any brand or model of x86 PC, it supports pretty much every component or peripheral I own, and it will run software not available for Linux.
So yeah, when something you make heavy use of adopts policies that you don't like, it's pretty common to discuss and criticize them. If nothing else, Microsoft (or any other company) would be wise to consider these complaints from users because they can easily impact their bottom line over time.
But related to your question - OS X does not leak data and comparing Windows with iOS or Android is comparing apples and oranges, as Windows is usually the desktop OS that has access to your company's VPN, your work and everything of importance, whereas a smartphone has at most access to your contacts, your calendar and your email. In other words sensitive, but not critical.
>OS X does not leak data
How to Stop Apple From Snooping on Your OS X Yosemite Searches http://www.wired.com/2014/10/how-to-fix-os-x-yosemite-search...
FYI: OS X Yosemite's Spotlight tells Apple EVERYTHING you're looking for http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/20/apple_spotlight_priv...
> comparing Windows with iOS or Android is comparing apples and oranges
This used to be true, a few years ago, but it isn't now.
Windows 10 is a mobile operating system that also runs on mobile phones. It has notifications and Cortana (from Windows Phone) and it integrates with online cloud storage (OneDrive). It's intended to be continuously updated and work with apps acrosss multiple platforms, including iOS and Android.
In sum, this is not your granddad's Windows....
As for ChromeOS, you are aware of what you're getting into from the beginning. In contrast, it wasn't always this way with Windows.
I have a Windows 7 computer that I use mainly for gaming and having those notifications pop up randomly is infuriating, it behaves like some crappy adware that comes bundled with IE toolbars.
No option to turn it off either, you have to manually uninstall a bunch of updates if you want to get rid of it. And I almost believed the "but MS has changed" crowd. I really hope Valve manages to bring gaming on linux so that I never have to bother with this crappy OS anymore.
Not sure which games you play, but most of my favorites turned out to be available on Steam for Linux. I made the switch after W10's release and have hardly regretted it.
The OS group is undoing all the progress the XBox group has won.
It was a stark reminder me how little control I have over my personal computers right now.
That's the process I did to get rid of the nagging on three Win7 machines.
http://au.pcmag.com/windows-10/39165/news/oops-update-glitch...
"Mistake my rear end!!! Microsoft got caught re-re-releasing KB3035583 and other related updates and now they're trying to walk back their outrageous and unethical behavior."
Hope you humans enjoyed your brief stint as the dominant organism on Earth! Thanks for playing!
[1]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Useterms/Retail/Windows/10/U...
[2]: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/business/dealbook/arbitrat...
None of "get your free copy sign up now", none of the "do you want to upgrade".
Same reason Chrome updates automatically in the background without your consent. It's just less invasive, because it's only a browser.
(I know, the horse has bolted long ago, no pointing harrassing this stable door. I will blame too many choccy biscuits after lunch...)
As in, "Let's memorialize the learns so we don't disrupt this value-add in the future."
1. Why upgrade? Windows 7 seems like a good, stable OS that stays out of my way and lets me get work done. Newer versions have these funky tiles and touch interface, neither of which I want or can even use.
2. I've heard if I let my Win 7 install "important Windows updates", one of the updates is nagware to persuade me to update to Win10. Can that be turned off? Will it violate my privacy?
3. The article says you get up to 31 days to try Win10 and still be able to roll back to your previous OS. Why only 31 days? Why not 60? Why not 10,000? Does some irrevocable change occur to the hard disk after 31 days that renders it incapable of supporting Windows 7?
4. Will it cost money to update to 10 after next year? I'm not necessarily opposed to paying for an upgrade if it's worth it -- it's a product that they spent millions of dollars developing, after all -- but I don't like feeling pressured. I'm just barely getting settled in with Win7, after all!
5. Are there any reasons to stay away from 10? I've heard the anti-privacy scare stories. Anything else? E.g. NSA back doors, or removed support for interacting with Linux, or some such?
[1] (Originally I bought the NUC to be a quiet, compact Linux server/workstation, but unfortunately the i5 model can't seem to run any of the Linux distros I threw at it, whereas Windows installed flawlessly. My main desktop has become a Mac Mini, actually :) [EDIT asterisks don't work :(]
4. Yes, for 1 year the upgrade is free. After that point you have to pay for the upgrade, just like to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8 you had to pay for an upgrade license.
5. Other than Microsoft's weird ideas on how they will push out updates that may affect your privacy it seems to work well enough in the industries I've tested it in. If you have any older 'expensive' software you may want to verify that it is compatible before migrating.
2. I think there is an option to ignore individual updates. You could probably utilize that to get that to go away.
3. Windows 10 literally saves a copy of your whole system running Windows 7 on the hard disk. That is deleted after 31 days.
4. They claim that it will begin to cost money to upgrade starting next year. Whether or not that becomes reality could go either way. My guess is that yes, it will cost money just like a new Windows 10 build costs money now.
5. You can turn off a good portion of the privacy-invading settings, but it's still fairly invasive. Microsoft as a company has actually been ramping up their support for other platforms which is kind of cool. I haven't heard about any specific back doors in the Windows OS itself, but that doesn't mean they aren't there. The OS is closed source, so it's really anyone's guess.
And then they push it again:
http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/you-need-to-stop-k...
"Updates that have been hidden can appear again if a new version of the same update is released. That’s the case with KB 3035583; not only has it received an update (thus unhiding it), it’s status as an ‘Optional’ update has been changed to ‘Important’."
This announcement today seems like they'll do it again, even stronger, with revenge.
"Early next year, we expect to be re-categorizing Windows 10 as a “Recommended Update”. Depending upon your Windows Update settings, this may cause the upgrade process to automatically initiate on your device"
Windows 10 strikes back.
> 3. Windows 10 literally saves a copy of your whole system running Windows 7 on the hard disk
And if you really try downgrade, it doesn't work:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/80e4f83d-1...
"Task scheduler is broken after windows 10 downgrade"
I have actually done it, so I can guarantee that it has worked correctly at least once ;-)
Many others have had the same experience, as Google will show....
YMMV. For me, Win10 totally destabilized a netbook that was previously running smoothly on Win7. And for some reason, the backlight control worked under 7 but not 10, locking the screen at a battery-draining 100% brightness. Wasted an hour or two on the phone with Microsoft just to learn that they have no idea of the cause or solution, despite web searches turning up plenty of reports of this issue. At least the revert function worked.
edit: Uh, yikes, apparently even that's a bit broken.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10477988
Windows is closed source but many thousands of people have actually read the code. This includes numerous governments (including the Russian government), US organizations, large companies, universities, and even amateurs (Microsoft MVPs).
If you want to read it, email source@microsoft.com or see Shared Source Initiative https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/
You will need a good reason. I don't think "I want to look for backdoors" will work. They might point out that plenty of other people have already done that ;-)
For the 31 days thing, I strongly suspect it's mostly just a marketing thing. "Try the newest Windows out for 31 days, risk free!". I could see it being an issue of storage on tablet devices with minimal storage or laptop/desktops with similar issues.
I've since wiped out my Win10 machine (by accident...oops) and went back to 8, since that's what I had a license and disc for. Not sure if I'll go back to 10. The privacy issues concern me greatly.
I use 10 at work, honestly it's not bad. I haven't upgraded on my home machines though...
Windows.old directory gets purged after 31 days, so there's no going back.
3) OK I'll guess at this one. Space. If they are retaining a bunch of information it may take up a significant amount of space they can free by getting rid of it. But I don't know for sure. It might just be that 31 days is a standard tech return policy period and they can.
2/4) I think you can turn the notifications off. And if you are going to learn a new OS it makes sense to learn the one that you are going to be moving to no the one you are going to be moving from. http://winsupersite.com/windows-10/disabling-windows-10-upgr...
5) This is opinion and people disliking the new direction of Microsoft. You get new features (Like Cortana) but it costs you in privacy. How much is that cost? Only Microsoft really knows... But you can always set up a dual boot or something to address some of those issues. MANY Linux distros are almost easier to get used to than Windows 10 (from windows 7). And win 10 even stole some features from them.
<soapbox> I just want to let everyone know that anything you post here (on the internet) is already being gobbled up by the NSA, just about anything you do on your phone, and now anything you do on your pc (presumably). Lets focus on changing the law, because Linux is not a viable solution for 99% (that stat is made up) of people, which means that your parents, friends, and everyone else aren't protected even if you are.
While changing the law is ridiculously hard, if you are concerned about privacy mention it to friends and family so they know and evangelize. Microsoft is no more evil than anyone else. I presonally think that at their core they don't want to give this data to the NSA, they want it to figure out how users are using the OS (what every dev wants). So they've tooled it to the Nth degree and it's only a privacy issue because they aren't clear what they collect (but they let you turn it off) and we don't trust them to let us turn it off. </soapbox>
A philosophy teacher once told me "you are not what you think, but you are what you say and what you do".
Nobody cares what they or don't want, it's what they do that counts. And what they do is not pretty, in fact in think it's despicable.
And I'm not "one of those Linux guys". I'm a C# dev that would be perfectly fine with Microsoft products as they are now if they didn't fuck their efforts with "telemetry" updates.
I'm trying 3 Linux distro this week-end to see the one I can live with.
Q3: The 31 day deadline is to free-up space once a user has settled down with Win10. Advanced users can work around this [2].
I can’t answer all these questions unfortunately! Q1 and Q5 are fairly subjective - I think it's up to you to form your own opinion on those.
[1] http://www.howtogeek.com/218856/how-do-you-disable-the-get-w... [2] http://www.thewindowsclub.com/rollback-windows-10-after-30-d...
Now, what to do regarding Windows 10 ? If you're a fairly computer savvy person, for home usage, I'll say disable the updates, get an AV and a firewall and keep a weekly backup.
Updates loose any credibility if the vendor issuing them cannot be trusted and MS has shown with those tactics what the endgame is. Checking every update what it does and if it's safe to apply to the system takes more time and energy then keeping a weekly backup of the system and basic security. Now why should someone play hide and seek with MS and their dark patterns instead of using the system as is ?
I'd say that this is a pretty sad state of OS updates we're in regarding Windows, if not software generally.
So, Windows 10 actually does not complete against Linux or PC-BSD, it completes against previous versions of Windows without telemetry crap, i.e. Windows 7 and Vista. Exactly these operating systems with disabled updates will dominate for the next 20 years, not Linux or BSD.
Btw, this approach (disabling updates) also solves all well known problems with long time reboots, metered internet connections, tray nags about Windows 10, insufficient disk space to save old OS etc.
Funny you mention pc-bsd. I lost the boot sector (perhaps) on my ssd in my win7 machine so this weekend I installed pc-bsd on the 'broken' ssd. During the install I was given a warning that something in my uefi was funny. Windows just failed to install with errors and no help to be found on the install cd (retail version).
So...I'm currently, as of 24 hours ago, using pc-bsd. I can't see most people going for it though. The kde desktop uninstalled itself randomly so I ended up installing gnome desktop and am using the classic version of gnome. It's going well now though. Actually really well, but I keep waiting for something bad to happen. If it behaves for a bit longer I might just switch.
There's an evil side to microsoft that I wouldn't miss but I do already miss liking microsoft. I've used them for a really long time. There's a lot of good design and engineering in there.
"Early next year, we expect to be re-categorizing Windows 10 as a “Recommended Update”. Depending upon your Windows Update settings, this may cause the upgrade process to automatically initiate on your device."
Not saying I believe that, just repeating what I read.
Second I know an elderly couple who doesn't know much about computers. When they got the prompt for upgrade, they didn't even think it was an operating system upgrade. They thought it was another windows update. Next morning they couldn't do anything as the start button wouldn't work, printers were gone, email settings were gone, critical error message when they click edge etc. Now for a tech savvy person, it wouldn't be a problem and you can easily fix these but they live far from city, like about a good 2 hour drive. Since I'm closest to them, this weekend I'll be making a trip there and fixing it wasting around 6-7 hours of my life just because of windows 10. Thanks Microsoft!
If it makes you feel any better: I went through this EXACT scenario yesterday. My grandfather accidentally installed Windows 10.
Fortunately, there's a button in Settings that lets you revert: http://www.howtogeek.com/220723/how-to-uninstall-windows-10-...
It worked perfectly and only took about 30 minutes. And the man uses his computer for a lot of stuff - personal bookkeeping, Word, Excel, Publisher, electronic document management, etc etc etc - and it's all 100% back to normal.
Have you checked the task scheduler?
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/80e4f83d-1...
Didn't work on my computer.
See also
http://au.pcmag.com/windows-10/39165/news/oops-update-glitch...
"These showed up on a plethora of my client's systems a few days ago after I had already removed them, unchecked them and hid them weeks earlier.
This is totally unethical, namely re-releasing KB3035583 after hundreds of thousands of people paid technicians to have these removed."
Microsoft are turning their back on a group of people who used to pay money upfront for premium products. How many of these users want a subscription service? Maybe they want a finished OS with high quality software pre-installed instead of some crappy app store.
Opposite problem with a notebook computer that my friend put Windows 8 on had a small ssd C drive and a big hard disk D drive. The prompt saying get ready for Windows 10 never showed up because the SSD didn't have enough space in it.
Losing settings shouldn't happen. Honestly, I'd have pushed harder requiring people to start fresh for those who want Windows 10.
I'd put (time-triggered?) big warning signs saying that Windows 7 ended mainstream support on January 14, 2020 and Windows 8 will end mainstream support on January 10, 2023 and that you should not use these products after this date unless you really know what you are doing. We are still more than four years away from that date though.
It would make a lot more sense to me for Microsoft to offer Windows 10 for free for a short time to everyone and say that regular prices will resume after this amnesty period.
The way they are putting Window 10 in Windows Update, it makes it seem like Windows 10 is a regular update to Windows. I don't understand this. I wanted to upgrade to Windows 10. The first thing I did when I got Windows 10 was to reset my computer. I am very happy to be able to say that I was able to reset my computer without an external drive. The process took less than two hours and didn't require me to enter a product key. (ymmv of course)
Maybe it is I who has changed and gotten busy/careless but this is the first time that I have gone to just using the computer and not really caring about Windows Update.
Google's Chromebooks did a lot to change my attitude towards computers.
I still obsess a little over some details like what is so important that is Onedrive writing constantly to C:\Users\[redacted]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneDrive\logs\Personal\TraceCurrent.6201.1019.etl at about 30000 Bps or why OneDrive seems to be constantly uploading things to a-0011.a-smedge.net at about 7 million bytes per second while reporting not nearly enough corresponding disk activity.
There is not much literature about this and the best I could find with a five second Google search was "TraceArchive.ETL and TraceCurrent.ETL are logging files which appear to contain the remnants of the smart folder feature in Windows 8.1." http://www.champlain.edu/Documents/LCDI/Windows%2010%20Foren... I guess I will attribute it to incompetence until I see some evidence of malevolence.
I guess tl;dr I agree with you. Upgrade to Windows 10 should not happen automatically. It should be a choice that the user (or device administrator) seeks.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/lifecycle
I'd like to apologize for the shoddy writing because this part should read
> Windows 7 will end extended support on January 14, 2020 and Windows 8 will end extended support on January 10, 2023
as you can see in http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/lifecycle
Say I just woke up, and I'm in a rush to boot up my computer, print out a paper, and get out the door. But--surprise! Windows Update ran in the background the night before, and now system startup is delayed half an hour or more to configure a new batch of patches.
On the one hand, from a security standpoint, I appreciate that the default is to keep users' systems up-to-date. On the other, it seems that Microsoft pushes this with little regard for their users' time or comfort.
>now system startup is delayed half an hour or more to configure a new batch of patches.
The default is that there is no configuration. The OS downloads the patches by default, installs them, then waits for the user to restart the computer to finalize things. The user can simply not restart the computer if they are in a hurry.
A small learning curve of "reset before turning off for the night on Tuesdays" alleviates that problem and I feel Microsoft made that trade off for user security with their general user (read: non-tech savvy people) as the primary users.
Personally I have automatic updates turned off and vet which patches get installed. But I'm more involved than the typical Windows users. I'd use a Linux distro if I could find suitable replacements for certain programs I rely on for my workflow.
> A small learning curve of "reset before turning off for the night on Tuesdays" alleviates that problem...
No. The problem remains. This just time-shifts the problem.
In recent memory, I've had two Patch Tuesdays that sent Windows into a 5+ deep post-boot-but-pre-login reboot loop while Windows tried to figure out how to apply several patches that would just not apply. (Spoiler alert: It never figured out how, but just -eventually- gave up.)
It doesn't matter what technical decisions and constraints lead to this post-boot-but-pre-login configuration process being the way things work, it's still awful.
Every Linux distro I use seems to have figured out how to apply and configure updates before you reboot a system, rather than during the next boot cycle.
The time was the problem in the example, so time-shifting is a legitimate fix to the problem here. "In a rush for work, turn on computer, 30 minutes of updates." was the problem.
>Every Linux distro I use seems to have figured out how to apply and configure updates before you reboot a system, rather than during the next boot cycle.
There are tradeoffs for doing things that way. Such as when everything eats shit and you regret updating.
For example:
Can be a complete nightmare.The trust in MS for being capable and responsible for handling the updates is broken.
Bad updates are bad updates, regardless of whether you do the configuration after a reboot (rendering the computer useless while you configure), or while the system is still running.
Not that it matters, but I've had far more bad updates on my Windows systems than I have on any of my Linux systems. :)
> ...time-shifting is a legitimate fix to the problem here.
It's not a fix. It's a band-aid that fails to address the root of the problem.
By catering to both the masses and the experts, MS is caught between a rock and a hard place. Forced, automatic updates are extremely irritating. But, without them, the vast majority of Windows users would never update anything. Never. Windows would have a much worse reputation for security because tens of millions of users would be getting regularly owned by hacks that were patched 8 years ago.
Obviously people are bitching like mad about this. Some of the most vocal seem to resent every change in Windows since XP SP2.
People are also bitching about telemetry, even though both the success of new upgrades depends on it, and even though all this anonymous data is actually driving Windows 10's development (in the same way that it drives Gmail, Facebook etc).
I guess it's a fact of life that if you have 1.5 billion users, then the odd hundred million or so will find something to bitch about, whatever Microsoft does....
Purchasing options include (though are not limited) methods comparable to previous Win versions, and it runs on hardware I own and am sitting in front of. The aaS appellation is often needlessly overloaded, I find.
Okay, so make a small adjustment to the parent(s), and think of their complaint/observation more like 'If you're going to transition users to a new golden era where every time you turn your computer on you have fast boot times (and a ten minute wait for updates to process), then don't make the transition such a brutally painfully experience - it reduces our trust in them as a vendor that they can actually deliver on promises of constant update golden eras'.Or something like that.
For many (perhaps most?) Microsoft platform users, all of what they require of their computer could still be done just fine with Windows XP SP2. As an aside, it's lovely that you mention specifically SP2 - so obviously a part of a previous 'continuous mostly small update' process that you imply we won't have until we embrace Windows 10. Anyway, all the intervening updates have for many people been a combination of frustration, time, and money misspent, with little practical gain. I am not one such bitchee, but I can understand the concerns. And if an operating system's success depends on knowing where I am, it's doing something wrong (all my other operating systems, current, and historic, have been successfully used by me without access to these data).And, really, it should not be funding / driving development the same way some service providers acquire personal data and then market it on your behalf.
The long-term idea is to have Windows delivered as a service like, say, a Chromebook. Or Gmail.
> you mention specifically SP2 - so obviously a part of a previous 'continuous mostly small update' process
Except it wasn't. SP2 involved a massive rewrite and was a significant upgrade. It could almost have been shipped as a new version of the OS, though it would have been somewhat unfair to charge for delivering what XP buyers should have had in the first place.
Anyway, XP SP2 was and still is worse than Vista SP1 or Windows 7 in all sorts of important ways. Sure, people could still use it (some are), but you could say the same about DOS 3.3. It just depends how many years of innovation and improvement you want to do without.
> And if an operating system's success depends on knowing where I am, it's doing something wrong (all my other operating systems, current, and historic, have been successfully used by me without access to these data).
It's one of the things that today's internet-aware mobile operating systems like to know. It's obviously more important when Windows 10 is running on a phone or a small tablet. It's generally not important on a desktop, but almost the whole web is using geolocation and cookies to track your location anyway, whether you like it or not.
> And, really, it should not be funding / driving development the same way some service providers acquire personal data and then market it on your behalf.
Location isn't driving development, but anonymized telemetry is. Indeed, it has done for some time, even if it was just feedback from Windows Update, or the rises/falls of popularity of certain software.
It has nothing to do with "marketing personal data". In fact, unlike Google, Microsoft doesn't even sell ads against the contents of your online emails.
I know the improvements exist (I've been sys-admining on/off since the early 1990's) but _for most people_ the functionality they had since, say, XP (or perhaps even earlier) is pretty much what they are using now. Web mostly, some office document manipulation, occasional printing, games.
I don't know anyone still using DOS 3.3, and indeed the user experience of trying to crank up a web browser on that OS would be truly horrendous.On the other hand I know LOTS of people still using XP. Government agencies and large commercials, mostly, but both are typically cited as the more important consumer demographic for Microsoft operating system.
(Plus pretty much every ATM on the planet, IIRC.)
My desktop, as you observe, is not a mobile operating system. And I have been particularly happy with my OS not knowing where I live for a long time - but that's just one point of data, I accept. Nonetheless, selling an update on the proposition that the new version has superior capabilities for tracking you isn't compelling (for most people, once you explain it to them).The 'whether I like it or not' ... is also not a good way of convincing someone of the merits of gratuitous change. : )
Or maybe you are? ;-)
> My point is that if you ask someone using Win7 or Win8 today what the advantages of that OS is over, say, Vista or XP, they probably can't provide any. Or, from a different angle, if they can think of anything that they can do on their current platforms that they couldn't do on the previous one.
I don't really see the point of your point. You might as well say that if you only need to drive half a mile to the shops, then a Model T Ford would do the job. True, but not every Windows user is stuck in the past.
Later versions of Windows handle memory and resources better, so they are smoother in operation, don't need frequent reboots etc, and they're also more secure. The time savings alone are more than enough to cover the cost of upgrading.
UEFI machines also boot and resume much quicker, which most people would notice.
There's a whole class of new lightweight sandboxed apps. There's a whole new Windows Store. There's better voice and handwriting recognition. There's massively better stylus support, which is being exploited in things like the Surface Pro.
> Plus pretty much every ATM on the planet, IIRC.
But not the desktop version....
> My desktop, as you observe, is not a mobile operating system.
Sure, but desktops are not exactly at the cutting edge in a world that is going mobile.
The point of Windows 10 is that it's a converged operating system that runs on mobile phones, tablets, and games consoles, with "universal apps" that are adaptable to all three platforms. Windows 10 will also run on everything from USB sticks to high-end workstations.
> And I have been particularly happy with my OS not knowing where I live for a long time
Exactly how does Windows 10 know where you live more than XP knew where you lived?
> the new version has superior capabilities for tracking you isn't compelling (for most people, once you explain it to them).
The tracking isn't any different from what was already in Windows 8/8.1 except for Cortana, which can be turned off. (And is turned off by default.)
It's not something a sensible person would worry about unless they've stopped using a smartphone and already take extensive anti-tracking measures while on the web. Microsoft is only doing a small fraction of the tracking that's done by Google and Google Android.
Oh, you should also stop using bank cards, and loyalty cards, and avoid shops because they have CCTV cameras. And you can't own or drive a car because of numberplate recognition. This is the serious stuff. Even then, you'll probably be tracked by the US government, regardless of whether or not you live in the USA....
Microsoft is far from the only offender of course (a PlayStation comes to mind, for example) but system designers really need to start using their brains on this.
When I am in a rush to check something online, I don't want to waste 5 minutes updating anything.
It's hilarious because when my stepdad has a problem with his windows computer my mom tells him maybe he should install Linux. Not that Linux is some magic OS that fixes every problem but I do think it has come a long was is now much more user friendly than Windows is now.
Can I declare somehow my connection "metered" or is this something MSFT decides?
Windows 7 is a much better version of Windows than Windows 10 will ever be so my suggestion would be wait a few years.
Everything has changed, nothing works like it once did, things that should would just don't work!
But wait, not everything is bad. It does boot really fast!!!
I purchased all new hardware and took Windows 10 as the $AUD 250.00 OS option.
I could have got Windows 7 as a cheaper option and should have done so......
I ran into the all too common Start Button not working issue:
https://www.techmesto.com/fix-start-menu-broken-windows-10-t...
After about three days I found out this was cause by me changing the location of the users Document and Setting folder, using the Location option as provided by Windows 10 itself.
To cut a long story short, DON'T TOUCH the location of that folder as it will break lots of things in Windows 10.
Also Windows 10 puts a new GUI layer over everything, so of course all your years of Windows knowledge is lost.
And here's another example of why that is just stupid.
There is a new GUI to create new user accounts and it is very easy to create new accounts, that is until the button stops working. You click on the button but nothing happens. No message, no nothing.
So when that happens what do you do?
You spend another two days searching, only to find the solution is to bypass the Windows 10 GUI and hit the old Windows layer using this bit of magic:
Running that command gives you the old Windows 7 user management dialog.Finally, Windows 10 seems to have an annoying intermittent habit of not understanding focus and z-order.
You click on a button and nothing happens.
You click on the button again and nothing happens.
You click on the button a third time and this time you notice the task bar flicker, only to find you have three new instances all hiding behind the current application.
That seems to happen a lot in the Settings panels.
In all previous Windows you could select and application using the start menu, right click and use the send to option to create a desktop shortcut.
Windows 10 has no such option.
To create a shortcut in Windows 10 you have to use the option to open the folder in explorer and from there you can then create the desktop short-cut.
Instead you get a pop up menu that display, each menu item but without any text. So you get a popup menu a few millimetres in width.
Needless to say it is a useless, unusable popup menu, but luckily a reboot does fix the issue.
Also: I have seen zero things I like less in Win10 than Win8.1 (save maybe for the privacy things). Can't imagine what they would be? Win7 was great, Win10 is (almost) what Win8 should have been if they had finished it before shipping.
The only real annoyance I had was that for each upgrade (I think I upgraded 5 PCs) I initially had to adjust a few settings where I had preferences other than the default (disable search bar, disable web results in search, make Explorer open on "This PC" instead of recent/frequent apps, disable OneDrive since I don't use it). Pretty annoying but takes 5 minutes and only needed to do it upon initial upgrade.
Not saying these are positive things at all but I'm a realist and I've never installed an OS or major upgrade where I didn't have to spend 5-10 minutes setting things up "my way" on first boot.
Otherwise, no BSODs, no broken applications, and a bit quicker and up to date than 7/8x. If anything, I was pleasantly surprised that an in-place Windows upgrade actually worked on all of my machines. In the past I always did clean installs but figured the free upgrade was enough incentive to give it a shot. If it didn't work, I could always clean install afterward but haven't had to.
I hope that OS updates eventually become like browser updates - they just happen and you don't notice. Seamlessly on the latest.
My computer didn't work with Windows 10, contrary to their claim that it would. The drivers I had on the notebook are "too old" and Intel doesn't support the devices for Windows 8 or 10 but MSFT claimed in their "Update to 10" nagware that it would work. It doesn't. I've discovered that only after two days of the immense number of the restarts of Windows 10, searching for the possible causes and finding the posts related to my hardware on the web forums.
And after I returned to Windows 7, it still presents "Upgrade to Windows 10" and to decline I had to uninstall more updates and put some registry entries which I had to search on the web (1). Far from easy to just say "it doesn't work please don't bother me or make the goddamn drivers."
Oh, and the return to Windows 7 from 10 actually didn't work too -- it screwed all the scheduled tasks (which were a part of the Windows 7 installation, not the tasks I've made!) (2)
---
1) This comment seemed to be the most useful: "This is totally unethical, namely re-releasing KB3035583 after hundreds of thousands of people paid technicians to have these removed."
http://au.pcmag.com/windows-10/39165/news/oops-update-glitch...
2) "Task scheduler is broken after windows 10 downgrade"
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/80e4f83d-1...
Cortana doesn't work in most countries (why? just why? I speak English ffs).
10 will know more about me than Facebook and Google combined (don't really care, but it's a bad thing imo).
No thanks, I'm happy with 7.
It's much easier to install/update some Linux distributions, and I don't think that's in their best interest.
Not a "media creation tool", doesnt require windows. Just the ISO.
If you are a PC gamer then install Windows 10 and use only a local account, disable all of its cloud integration, disable all the telemetry and logging and use a third party firewall to block anything else that the OS options do not let you disable.
Then use another machine with another operating system like Linux that doesn't behave like it owns you and your entire system, for all your other personal/professional computing needs.
Besides, you can choose your hardware for both battery life and linux hardware compatibility.
Both my Chromebook Pixel 2015 and Thinkpad Carbon X1 (3rd gen) have equal Linux/Windows battery life. The Pixel regularly lasts 6 hours even when doing dev work. Runs windows perfectly under libvirtd.
It's so strange and annoying to keep hearing these 10 year old Linux memes repeated all the damn time.
Also, it looks like for those like myself that have done this, it now appears to be a stand alone update with no KB identifier. You can do the same thing to this update; just Hide it! This work around will probably be overridden by some future update, but it will give you temporary respite from this windows 10 upgropalypse.
In other words, carefully check the updates. I had to hide it again several times already. I shouldn't have to do that :(
So it really is time to move to Linux.