Should I Upgrade To Windows 10

[Zachrulez]

What they're doing to try to force upgrades ought to be illegal IMO.

[Papa Zito]

I agree.

[Psyche]

meh

[talah]

It's not really about the incovenicence, it's more about the trend for your information being a commodity.

It's not only Win10 that suffers from this erosion of choice; as an enterprise data/network/application administrator I can attest that there is a huge push from big data to "just put your stuff in the cloud". It's being memed as "disruptive data" among every big data company and its purpose is to shame responsible IT admins in front of managers and CEOs who would like to buy the hype of it.

Where is your data stored? Where is your *customer's* data stored? Do you have a duty of care to give a shit about this? "Disruptive data" says no. Disruptive data is a meme that says you're stupid for not immediately buying in to any technology which is -ipso facto- forward facing and without consequence.

Very few people question the technology or the pervasiveness of storing your data in the cloud for anyone who has access to it, to see. (And I bet you don't know who exactly that is.)
But the same theme has been pushed on us for quite a long time and apparently most people either don't care or are okay with it.
The theme is "Your privacy should *not* be private on the net and everything you do should be available to us to market products to you - and you can't actually stop that from happening"

No matter how many opt-out cookies you have, ad companies that are either first or third parties of your favourite search engine are given a free license to track your IP and activity and push ads from their sponsors in your face.

And now Microsoft have taken a turn that not even Apple took which is taking control over software compatibility, out of your hands, and even control of your computer wholesale out of your hands, and have made it into a product for unknown parties. For the last couple of years at least, if you've had Win7+ and have been religiously installing updates as was best practice, you've been installing microsoft products which send a shitload of information to them about your user activity and your PC activity which "Helps you to upgrade to the most recent version of Windows".

I've been crippled as an administrator by the way MS are going about things. I've had to manually schedule uninstalls for updates which suck CPU and send unknown information to Microsoft, and review them one by one. Where I used to have a faith in MS security patches being "always as up-to-date as possible", now I need to review every single update which is published to make sure it doesn't cripple our systems or compromise our data. And even then I have no faith that Microsoft hasn't decided that every Windows user's content isn't their property and are just taking it anyway.

So yeah. I wouldn't upgrade but even if you're on Win7 or Win8.1 you probably already have the "telemetry updates" which Microsoft have already helped themselves to. I can't stop it, although if I was a legislator, I'd make this shit illegal.

More info here:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=microsoft+telemetry+updates

It's also possible to set a registry key to stop Win10 advertising:

Code: Select all

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Gwx]
"DisableGwx"=dword:00000001

^If you save that into a text file and change the extension to .reg (as opposed to .txt) then double click, reboot, you shouldn't get any more prompts to install Win10.

Current Telemetry updates for Win7 / Win8.1 are unfortunately a bit more difficult to avoid and becoming more difficult (egh).

[talah]

Actually the .reg file needs a registry header to work properly, if anyone's interested. Below is corrected.

Code: Select all

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Gwx]
"DisableGwx"=dword:00000001

Note that I believe that this will stop you from upgrading to Win 10 from 7/8.1 through the "Get Windows 10" prompts while they still have it for free up till July 29th. If you change your mind and want to get it before then, there's an article here that explains both blocking the update and restoring it. There are also some update prereqs explained there if you do want it and are having trouble upgrading.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/kb/3080351

In the interests of providing options, if you want to remove the blocking registry key and re-scan for GWX (ie "Get Windows X"), you'd copy the folowing into a notepad file and save it as whatever.cmd and double-click to run it. That'll delete the registry key above and kick of an upgrade compatibility scan/re-offer.

Code: Select all

schtasks /run /TN "\Microsoft\Windows\Setup\gwx\refreshgwxconfigandcontent"
“reg delete HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Gwx /value DisableGwx”

Interestingly the new update options offer a sort of offline branch mainly intended for businesses which we'll kind of be stuck with where I work.
Here if you're interested in this kind of stuff (it's called LTSB).
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/itp ... -servicing

The advantage to this option is that you're not forced to install updates if you have business software which may-or-may-not-be compatible with a short-term mandatory update plan by the time updates auto-install. There are several disadvantages though, including things like Out-of-box apps (really simple and essential things like the camera and calendar apps) not included in the image because they're intended to be updated with the other update model... and a tonne of awkward and terrible workarounds to get around them.

Egh. Anyway I'm off-topic now so I'll just shaddup :P

[Zachrulez]

Anyone else have their computer freeze with the anniversary edition update? My laptop did exactly this.

[Psyche]

one year later i still love windows 10 more than tech nerds think i should

[Cheery Dog]

I refuse to upgrade to the newer addition. The way it tells me it exists keeps pissing me off

[Ankamius]

I used a program to delete everything related to windows 10 from my computer and set my computer to not install them again. I'm mostly not upgrading out of principle at this point.

[Psyche]

luddites

[Caira]

I don't mind it. I thought it would be the devil. But then I turn on the news to trump and realized win 10 couldnt be that evil

[BBmolla]

I didn't upgrade

[Psyche]

wow

[Elbirn]

I really miss having a normal start menu.

Win7 was just perfect and now its gone

[profii]

I think the only reason not to is if your computer is slow and wouldnt work very well. Otherwise do it!

[Elbirn]

Can these bots be purged from our lands?

Edit: thanks mods

[SleepyKrew]

not until bbmolla upgrades

[BBmolla]

yeah I'm still on 7 lmao

[Psyche]

ugh

[Equinox]

Can these bots be purged from our lands?

Please edit the links out of the quotes.

[hiplop]

10 is gr8

[talah]

I'm still using 8.1 and it's fine as a non-volatile substitute for 7 until 2023 (when public support ends) iirc.

I have a laptop running Linux Ubuntu which is free and open source but haven't delved into limitations with that, yet. I know it runs things like Firefox and Steam, but for example some steam games don't have Linux versions. Some software I've bought specifically for Windows won't work with it either, that I know. However, most new software and games have Linux/Ubuntu versions.

If you don't much care about carrying old licensed software with you, Ubuntu is an extremely viable alternative to Windows these days, and it's especially good if you care about privacy and stability.

https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop

(I've worked on the ground in enterprise OS's for 15 or so years. Windows sucks on many levels and the sooner you get out the better imo. Linux is actually next-gen OS - being open source - and you can even run Windows stuff with Virtual Machines if you have the need to and know-how, or a savvy friend who does.)

[Awoo]

I've been using Linux Mint exclusively and I've never looked back. It's a very newbie friendly distro, and unlike ubuntu, it comes with a normal start menu out of the box.

[GeneralWu]

Windows 7 is undoubtedly one of the best operating systems of all time.

Some of the themes are quite refreshing to the eye. It's also quite fun to use. I used to go on my dad's Windows 7 computer every day just because I liked the operating system. THere's quite a lot of things you can customize with it.

Windows 7 also has a whole ton of nice wallpapers. You get high-quality photos of things like plants, scenes, buildings, and even anime characters. The themes in general look really nice, and it's quite good for your eyes to be honest. This wallpaper is probably one of the best default wallpapers of all time, and coupled with the aero theme it looks amazing:



Windows 7 also comes with quite a few games (like Chess Titans, Checkers, Mahjong, and even this game called Purble Place that I used to play).

I've used Windows 10 on my school's computers, and it's honestly not that good compared to Windows 7. It doesn't have the same refreshing look, and it kind of loses it's classic look. The aesthetic changes are comparable with the changes from iOS 6 to iOS 7.

I feel like one of the only benefits of Windows 10 is application support, but most applications that support Windows 10 support Windows 7 anyways.

[GeneralWu]

I haven't really messed around with Windows XP, but if anyone happens to have a computer running that operating system, you probably shouldn't upgrade it (if you can upgrade in the first place).

Windows XP has always been a mystery to me, since it's older than me and I never really got a chance to use it. The only times I actually got to play with it were when I decided to turn on a big, old, slow computer I used to have.
I really miss the screensavers of Windows XP to be honest.

I also really liked the game 3D Pinball for Windows (or whatever the pinball game was called), which came with Windows XP but I unfortunately don't know how to get it on other devices.