New Get Windows 10 screen – is it more confusing, or enlightening?

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You may have noticed the brouhaha in the press about the new “Get Windows 10” nag screen that’s starting to show up on Win7 and 8.1 machines. Paul Thu
[See the full post at: New Get Windows 10 screen – is it more confusing, or enlightening?]

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What a dirty underhanded thing to do the the unsuspecting public!

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“Can you believe it’s come to this?”

No, I cannot. Up until now, Microsoft has absolutely owned the desktop (i.e. desktops and laptops). But by forcing W10, and apparently the new way of doing things — Windows 10 being the forever version, continually updated — Microsoft risks losing their absolute dominance in the desktop arena.

It was stunning to see company after company surrender their respective dominance to Microsoft (Novell, Borland, etc.) back when Microsoft was making their climb to the top. And now it looks like Microsoft is in the process of surrendering its dominance to… Google? Apple? Linux? That remains to be seen.

Corporations will always have a significant number of desktops / laptops. Microsoft is giving up this market, when they could very easily hold onto it.

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Click the X activates the upgrade…reminds me of malware and adware…click the X to close it out and bang, they got you.

Pretty sad for a multi billion corporation to sink to that level.

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I am not sure I understand what is going on with this dialog box. Are you saying that closing the window prompt by Xing out of it actually initiates the W10 upgrade. If that is true it is so counterintuitive that you may safely conclude that it is premeditated to confuse and trick an unsuspecting user to start the upgrade. This smacks of the type of “social engineering” used to trick users into installing malware on their systems. Sad to see MS is comfortable traveling this trail as I don’t think they are in the greatest company.

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That’s correct. If you dismiss the dialog box by “X”ing out of it, your upgrade is scheduled.

You then have a 15-minute window to cancel the upgrade. (Or you can run GWX Control Panel and not worry about it.) You’ll also, no doubt, be able to refuse the EULA and have the upgrade either aborted or rolled back. No information about that part.

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Microsoft is giving up this market…

What makes you think so? Corporations do not use Home Edition and now Pro is not recommended any more in a fully managed environment. There are hundreds if not thousands of Group Policies available to manage a Windows 10 Enterprise Edition and there are other tools which are part of the System Center suite, like Configuration Manager which are maintained in full and updated regularly.
End users can to a large extent manage their own Pro version using the built-in Local Group Policy editor if they need to do that, although generally Microsoft does not recommend it, especially for those with limited technical skills, although those skills can be learnt if there is an interest.
Windows 10 Enterprise and probably Pro will be adopted in corporations, there is no doubt about it.
And for those in environments with special requirements there is another less publicised edition named Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB.

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Clearly, Microsoft’s ethical standards have sunk to a new low. Their desperation to shove Windows 10 down users’ throats grows exponentially with each passing week. I have finally lost any remaining shred of respect I may have had for this devious corporation and I am sure I’m not alone.

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Lawsuit time. Bold, brazen deception! With material consequences, too!

The problem: Do we have any plaintiffs? Or is the issue not important enough?

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The problem is that there’s no legal standing, as I understand it.

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It seems bizarre to me.

I’ve mentioned several times here how I wonder if the employees there who are pushing these efforts through and making these ethical decisions have any cognitive dissonance about what they are doing. Surely they are intelligent, nerdy, possibly “liberal”, not driven only by money/power, not fooled by convenient-seeming strong-arm short-term strategies that have high long-term risks.

I wonder if anyone there has said, “No, I can’t follow these orders (to institute whatever evil scheme); they aren’t what we are about as a company, and they will have the opposite effect to what we want.”

I wonder what the main competitors are privately saying about these tactics — how they are projecting that MS’ actions will be sending customers their way.

@Woody —
All I know is that I hope Woody will consent to write a new “For Dummies” (or other family of titles, or just under his own name) magisterial tome along the lines of:
“How to disentangle your life from Microsoft and find adequate substitions without losing your mind or your last shred of personal privacy (and before Windows 7 stops being supported!)”

(yeah, the working title isn’t too snappy!)

But I’m not joking — I’m going to need such a guide, and I think a lot of folks will want help with this issue in the next couple of years!

—
This theRegister.co.uk article was mentioned in the Computerworld article that Woody posted about earlier today:

“The ‘new’ Microsoft? I still wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole
In an as-a-service world, everything hinges on trust”

“…I see a company that does whatever it wants, whenever it wants.
If enough customers disagree with Microsoft loudly enough, a response will appear on a VP of somethingorother’s blog detailing why Microsoft Knows Best and thus nothing will change.”

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/06/thoughts_on_the_new_microsoft/

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In the optional updates for May that are sitting on users machines currently…… amongst them is the
KB3035583 GWX patch. I would assume that if this particular patch is installed it would trigger this new Get Windows 10 Ad. that is currently causing a lot of angst. Would this be correct or are there other ways in which MS can orchestrate this new invasion.
If this is a correct assumption then those that are not anxious to upgrade can avoid this hassle by hiding and not installing this patch yet again!
Although I’m not sure hiding can keep one safe, as
I’m guessing that WU when checking daily would see
that patch missing and just replace it. I have
WU to check but to notify before downloading and only important updates. Having read the difficulties in updating manually that others have experienced I have resorted to the lesser of the 2 evils! LT

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Right on, Poohsticks. Many/most of us have been through an entire lifetime without having to worry about what operating system (company) we need to switch to. What a privilege that has been.

Vista shook our confidence, though it looked like it was just too big a job technically.

We started to wonder over a few of the decisions we saw with Windows 7, but the refinements made it worth it.

We worried when we saw where Windows 8 was going. That whole “fade aero glass out during the pre-release” smelled of new deviousness. But it was possible to revert or augment around many of the badnesses and make a good system out of it.

Now with Windows 10 we can no longer ignore the simple truth: The golden age of computing has come and gone.

What will we do when our current computers die?

-Noel

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The specific ad people see seems to vary widely. I haven’t been able to figure out exactly who is seeing what ad, and why.

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I think it was found before that KB3035583 is what triggers the ad. If you do the configuration in KB3080351 or use Josh’s GWX Control Panel you should avoid the nagware even if somehow you install KB3035583 by mistake or even intentionally to get it out of the way :). I am not in favour of hiding updates, unless it is done for very short time and only for the purpose of testing and learning about various updates and how they supersede each other. The reason is that the action of hiding can create issues later when it may interfere with updates which Microsoft either re-releases or replaces dynamically via Windows Update. It is far better to just ignore those updates which you don’t want to install for any reason, then to hide them.

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Yes, a good point ch100…. and thank you for mentioning it. Well for me basically I’ve only hidden the GWX ones and those crazy whacky timezone ones, oh yes and those rouble ones…I think.. so hopefully won’t fall in to a hole. But thinking aloud here,
I kept an optional patch some months ago for downloading Win10…. which actually was written up if that is the correct phrasing in the Windows Update stating Win10 was ready to download….. and click
the required button to start. This was before I got
Josh’s ap… and I had it sitting there for ages…
but then one day the optional update for this was ticked. And that made me feel the next thing would be that MS decided to call it important. So that’s when I really started to feel I needed to do something more positive and reactive to all of this. And one of the things was to hide it before it became a real problem…… and of course that’s when I also started using Josh’s Control app and also the advice from everyone here including Woody of course! Josh’s app needless to say removed all the files and stuff from my machine and has kept it all safe! It’s always a hard call to make when you realise you know very little so it very much appreciated to read and receive such good advice as I find on this blog!
So thank you v. much indeed. LT

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There’s clearly a “next page” icon on the right edge.

Has anyone screen-grabbed what all the other pages of that dialog look like?

I’ll never see it, but I am genuinely curious.

-Noel

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If Microsoft uses malware tricks, then we should employ appropriate tactics. Don’t click on any part of the dialog, just start Task Manager and kill the application. Then uninstall all W-10 trash and search the registry for more trash (or use GWX Control Panel). And it might be a good idea to reinstall W-7 or W-8/8.1 after July 29.

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No need to manually kill the application. Just run GWX Control Panel. It’ll handle all the wet work.

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I’m sure they are all caught up in “how good windows 10 is” (that was hard to type..) and how they are “helping the poor users who have no clue how to install an OS”.

When the company line is all around you its nearly impossible move any other direction or see outside of the boundaries.

Like and promote windows 10 or become the assistant to the intern in charge of Windows 7.

(microsoft buys Apple and google this decade takes over the world, and by the end of the next decade we are all dead. “It all went wrong when they bought out spacex and got the nuclear warhead contract — it was the cascade crashing driver update failure. It all traces back to when they made windows 8.x/10” -survivor from the future)

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That’s an interesting proposal, to reinstall W7 or W8/8.1 after July 29. I am wondering how practical this is for those who do not experience any issues at that time.
There are 2 ways to do it:
– Totally clean install, which means reinstalling everything else in addition to Windows, except for what is considered not needed any longer and this would be a useful way of getting rid of more stubborn old applications which do not have a clean uninstaller. There may be issues with reactivating Windows and Office which would require calling Microsoft to resolve
– Upgrade in place from Windows, which reinstalls Windows to an almost clean state, with no Windows patches, all applications being still installed with some requiring repair which is only a minor annoyance in most cases. Not entirely clean install, but good enough for most users. This is the procedure to follow when Windows needs major repair, but still bootable.

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Be weary of what KBs you are installing is all I can say to this, cough KB3123862, there’s a few others but I can’t remember them at the moment, any others care to say what other updates contain W10 nagware?

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How does MS motivate employees to participate in the Windows as malware exercise? My guess would be compensation incentives linked to Windows 10 adoption rates. It’s no longer surprising what people will do for money.

But on a grander scale, I see MS fighting for survival. Consumer computing is moving to a new model that involves free or nearly free application software running on friendly, mobile devices that require only a fingertip and a little intuition to be useful. MS has seen its competitors scamper into the new world but, with Windows 10, has found the portal to be a tight fit for its own bloated frame.

The business community is slower to change than are consumers but the signs are there for the observant.

That MS will lose market share seems obvious. Whether it will survive, is uncertain. Faced with the reality of change, some giants like IBM learned to adapt and prosper. Others like DEC and Compaq didn’t.

For myself, my patience is exhausted. I’m voting with my wallet for ease of use and that doesn’t include spending hours every month trying to figure out how to keep my home network safe from MS.

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@Robert W
I guess one could say a little or a lot about MS and it’s tortured mobile efforts. I do not believe that MS was incapable of being successful in mobile; they were just not capable of doing it in the manner they insisted upon. When they first put Windows phone on the small screen of the smartphone, they insisted upon making you deal with the look of the PC desktop which just did not work well on the form factor. Now MS wants to make the desktop have the look and feel of a mobile device, which underutilizes the large screen real estate and does not serve the desktop content creator well. The one windows everywhere dogma has served to degrade their efforts across multiple platforms, both to the detriment of the user and MS. I would love to see others weigh in on this, but I do believe that MS needs to build a better “mousetrap” or they will forever be trying to force feed their product on users with a predictably bad outcome for all concerned.

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So Anony …
I said MS will fail and you explained how and why. No argument except for the word ‘forever’. The marketplace does not tolerate perpetual failure.

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