Sunday, October 16, 2016

The Answer is "Hell, no"

The question is, "Should I upgrade to Windows 10?"

I have had several occasions where Windows 10 Beta (which is really what it is) has updated itself on Saturday night rendering the laptop unusable for church Sunday morning.  I thought I had changed its update schedule to Wednesday, but apparently not.  This morning it had done a "Critical" update last night, an apt description because it left the laptop in that condition: utterly useless.  I did a system restore to September 30, two updates ago, and everything is now working again.  The temptation to install Windows 7 on it (were it available) is very strong.  In the meantime, I have edited the registry to stop updates.  There is apparently no built-in way to do this.

Remember: Windows 10 was "free."  Microsoft never does something for free.  Windows 10 users are unwitting beta users.

7 comments:

  1. For a long time I resisted getting Win 10. Before it wouldn't allow me to postpone it any longer, I made an image of my disk just in case I didn't like it (they said I could revert back to Win 7 if I didn't like 10, but I didn't really trust them.

    I have to say, I pretty happy about Win 10. I wouldn't say it's a great improvement over Win 7, but I feel it's enough better that I'm not at all anxious to go back to Win 7.

    Now that I'm retired, I'm a pretty average user. Most of what I do is surf and email with a little Exel and Word thrown in so there certainly can be features I might not like if I knew more about them, but they don't seem to get in my way.

    I am concerned by the constant erosion of my privacy. My guess is that Google and Yahoo are just as bad about that as MSFT.

    I would probably go to Linux except that I sometimes use some stock charts that do not work on Linux.

    Just my $0.02

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  2. I did not upgrade to 10 but did get a new laptop in July with Win 10 installed.

    I see no advantage to it over 7 and some disadvantages such as forced upgrades, very slow search, a green bar in file explorer that takes forever to load, inability to set file explorer to show detail view and stay there and some other gripes.

    10 is OK but if I had my druthers I would still be using 7.

    John Henry

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  3. I have stuck with Win7 Ult. and installed a small program called GWX Control Panel; its only function is to stop Win10 from installing, and if any of that malware is present it removes it. I highly recommend GWX CP to anyone wanting to keep their Win7 installation intact (though it may not be necessary anymore, as the surreptitious installation scheme seems to have come to an end.)

    There are far too many disaster stories about Win10, and only a few faint praises for it. I know personally two people that have lost a lot of work because of 10; their fault, in that they hadn't backed up their work, which they now do faithfully.

    My old laptop was running Win7 and I let Win10 install on it, just to try it out for myself. As usual, MS had buried some things I use frequently and added some features that I have no use for, but I found it OK- for awhile. Then one of those stealth updates did something- I have no idea what, it happened overnight- and now the laptop won't boot. It gets to the splash screen, but that's where it stays.

    When I get time, I'm reformatting it and re-installing Win7. 10 just isn't worth the trouble it causes, IMHO. I'm also concerned that it's always "calling home" with God knows what information, which isn't cleared by me first. MS should realize that it's MY machine, not theirs, and I'm the one who decides what gets sent out, not them.

    I still have no problems with Win7, but when its time is over- if I'm still going myself, I'll be installing Linux in the next box I build!

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  4. Microsoft hasn't built a decent OS since MSDOS 3.31.

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  5. The problem I have with preventing Win10 updates is a lot of them are "security" fixes (peruse your update history to see). Before the 1607 anniversary edition I could set updates to be only security fixes (but the update settings claimed you would still get feature updates in a big chunk every few months). That setting is gone now. And there seems to be no way to prevent updates.

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  6. The problem I have with disabling updates in Win10 is a lot of them are "security" fixes. Before they force fed me 1607 (anniversary edition) there was a setting to only allow security updates and delay feature updates to a few months in the future. Now I cannot find any way to stop updates or regulate which ones I'm willing to accept...including registry changes.

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