Microsoft Sets Stage For Massive Windows 10 Upgrade Strategy

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The Windows 10 nag machine has gone into overtime. Personally, I plan on upgrading but I haven't had time to do the upgrade. In the mean time, I am getting relentless pop-up windows nagging me to upgrade to Windows 10. :(

"Over Thanksgiving weekend I started getting reports that the Windows Update 'AllowOSUpgrade' setting was getting flipped back on on a number of peoples' PCs, and it keeps re-setting itself at least once a day if they switch it back off," said Josh Mayfield, the software engineer who created GWX Control Panel.
 
christ on a pony, Win10 is now officially worse than iOS when it comes to upgrade nags. I sincerely wish it was feasible for me to run Linux -- until AutoCAD Mechanical runs on Linux natively, it's a no-go.
 
Tempted to put it on my laptop that came with win8, I mean yeah I have the front end to make it like Win7, but man that OS stressed me out from the start before that happened, don't want to go through that same stress if it's a similar "hey look we made a smartphone interface on your PC again" setup.
 
I'm getting closer to upgrading on my main machine as more stable drivers for my AICs have been released, but I'm still waiting for Nvidia to release Fermi WDDM 2 drivers.

Meanwhile, the stupid nag window has 2 buttons, both of which will install 10. Kind of a trick for less experienced users that don't know the only way to say "no" is to close the window. Hitting "install later" starts the download & install process. I'm almost out of drive space because it keeps downloading the files without my permission.
 
they need a opt out that stays i need my win 7 media center left alone dammit.
 
Yeah and today is Patch Tuesday--have about 18 updates that want to install and when I click on the "More Information" link it says the page is unavailable--can't get any info on the updates. Even tried manually entering one particularly ominous KB into a search engine and results came up nil--think I'm gonna wait a few days and see what comes of it. Hate having to play cat and mouse with MS over this stuff. I believe my Windows 7 is valid until sometime around 2020. That was the idea when I paid to lease it from MS.
 
They are really proving themselves to be complete assholes on this whole situation - if there really is no available information about these updates being pushed today (considering it's Patch Tuesday as noted) then yeah, it's a big problem and none of them will get to my machine until I can verify every last one of them for their intended purpose.

Microsoft, what the fuck are you people doing?
 
tordogs said:
Yeah and today is Patch Tuesday--have about 18 updates that want to install and when I click on the "More Information" link it says the page is unavailable--can't get any info on the updates. Even tried manually entering one particularly ominous KB into a search engine and results came up nil--think I'm gonna wait a few days and see what comes of it. Hate having to play cat and mouse with MS over this stuff. I believe my Windows 7 is valid until sometime around 2020. That was the idea when I paid to lease it from MS.
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Thank you for reminding me it was patch Tuesday. There is a cumulative update on Windows 10 that I am installing as I type this. I have no issues with Windows 10 and think it is a fantastic OS and in fact, Flight Simulator 10 does work on it. However, if you have something that does not work on it or need Media Center, than I can see this possibly being annoying.
 
Quix said:
You're better off just installing a real version of Linux and the Linux version of Steam. All the same games and much better experience otherwise.
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Yup, pretty much this stuff. Also, the SteamBox hardware advertisement lists that there's like 6,000 games that have Steam OS and/or Linux versions. There's lotsa stuff to do gaming-wise on a Linux-based PC...more than enough to last an entire lifetime. Steam OS is like a media center and console sorta thing. Media center computers are for weirdos. Get a full distro that doesn't make it annoying to install non-Steam programs.
 
Dick move by Microsoft. I get the push to upgrade, but this is very pushy car salesman tactic. No means no. People know it's available, if they want to upgrade, they will.

Too intrusive, IMO. Everything I have was moved to Windows 10 a while back, so I'm not noticing anything. Just going off the reports. I wouldn't care much for it. It just angers people.
 
I tried the "gwx control panel download" tool available for download various places.
It worked for me.
 
I'm going back to Windows 7 on my Sager laptop as soon as I find time. Been noticing a lot more instability that usual lately. On top of that, not a fan of the lack of compatibility for certain software I use. (for example, tethering via USB to my phone works perfectly on 7... on 10 it just wont do anything)

The data mining and lack of transparency with windows update is also a turnoff
 
OMFG this shit is getting ridiculous. Let us move to Win10 on our own terms MS. I appreciate free, but not everyone is ready yet. I will likely move my main Win 8.1 box to Win10 soon, but I need to feel confident that Nvidia drivers and stability of my favorite game won't be a factor. Some nights I just want to go home and play a game, not troubleshoot.

However, my biggest issue is the Win10 install is not 100% foolproof yet. Most people never experience a problem, but some do. My father fell for the "remind me later" option which attempted to install Win10 on his laptop overnight a week later. The install failed, rolled back to Win7, and also messed up his Win7 install slightly during the rollback. One thing that happened was Win Explorer didn't refresh properly...meaning he would rename a folder and the rename wouldn't stick until he rebooted. This was a simple registry setting except somehow the parent folder where the necessary registry settings were stored had gone completely missing after rolling back to Win7. With the other issues he had I wasn't going to waste time fixing them all, I simply re-imaged his machine. He's not happy that I told him his next attempt at Win10 will necessitate a clean install and he might lose his info because he hates backing up (I forced him to anyways).
 
I'm so happy I'm done with Windows. The only Windows computer left in the house in the wife's and that's solely because she's still in grad school. Once she's done with that (3 classes left) I'm kicking that Windows install to the curb too.

Win10 scared the shit outta me the other night. It started updating to build 1511 Sunday night after my wife had finished working on a presentation for Monday night. Luckily my wife has been trained well and she already had e-mailed a copy of her work to herself.

My point is though we had no warning. No way to cancel. Just poof I'm installed now reboot me! I didn't have much choice except to reboot because if I deferred the reboot and something happened during the day while I was at work there would be hell to pay if something went wrong.

Now Win10 did upgrade successfully but I'm still pondering what the flying fsck MS is doing under the hood.

I'm guessing the update took about 2 hours. My Arch Linux install after not being used for 5 months took 25 minutes to update and 20 minutes of that was simply downloading the 1GB of updates. So seriously...wtf?
 
Vermillion said:
I'm so happy I'm done with Windows. The only Windows computer left in the house in the wife's and that's solely because she's still in grad school. Once she's done with that (3 classes left) I'm kicking that Windows install to the curb too.

Win10 scared the shit outta me the other night. It started updating to build 1511 Sunday night after my wife had finished working on a presentation for Monday night. Luckily my wife has been trained well and she already had e-mailed a copy of her work to herself.

My point is though we had no warning. No way to cancel. Just poof I'm installed now reboot me! I didn't have much choice except to reboot because if I deferred the reboot and something happened during the day while I was at work there would be hell to pay if something went wrong.

Now Win10 did upgrade successfully but I'm still pondering what the flying fsck MS is doing under the hood.

I'm guessing the update took about 2 hours. My Arch Linux install after not being used for 5 months took 25 minutes to update and 20 minutes of that was simply downloading the 1GB of updates. So seriously...wtf?
Click to expand...

Perhaps it is time to upgrade your wife's computer to an SSD? That is most likely the reason it took 2 hours when my upgrades take no longer than 10 to 15 minutes.
 
ToddW2 said:
So what desktop is everyone running on linux now
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Linux Mint 17.1 KDE here. I started off with the Ubuntus like Kubuntu, Xubuntu etc to try them out (I hate the regular Ubuntu, it's almost worse than windows 8) but now I'm on Mint and happy with it.

I have a windows 7 machine I use for gaming and other windows specific apps, but I try to do everything in Linux now.

Right now windows 7 is pretty much the latest viable OS from Microsoft, so if you need Windows for anything, 7 is the way to go. 8 is a huge disaster, and from sounds of it, 10 is probably almost as bad. There's really no reason to be on 8 or 10 right now, 7 works fine. 8 and 10 feel like some super beta experiment to me. Would not touch it with a 10 foot pole for production use.

But the downside is 7 will eventually hit a point where stuff wont work in it any more, and there wont be a viable upgrade path. So now is a good time to start considering a migration to Linux. I think 7 will be like XP though, where they keep having to extend support.
 
ManofGod said:
Perhaps it is time to upgrade your wife's computer to an SSD? That is most likely the reason it took 2 hours when my upgrades take no longer than 10 to 15 minutes.
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That reasoning doesn't fly with me. My Arch install isn't an SSD either. 1GB of updates. 289 updates to be exact. 5 minutes to install. So is the problem really the hardware? I have a hard time believing that.
 
Vermillion said:
That reasoning doesn't fly with me. My Arch install isn't an SSD either. 1GB of updates. 289 updates to be exact. 5 minutes to install. So is the problem really the hardware? I have a hard time believing that.
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My experience says otherwise but, feel free to believe whatever you want. Having an SSD makes a significant difference.
 
I agree with all of the sentiments in this thread. I'm going to make the upgrade before the free period runs out, just haven't had time yet. It's getting quite annoying having all of these screens popping up and ruining the user experience. I also tried clicking the "I'll install later box" and found out that basically queues up the update. It stops your normal updates from happening and you need to make sure to actually go in and uncheck the 2GB "upgrade to windows 10" option when you want to do updates. It's even better that when you do that and you click okay, it still says "Installing Windows 10" in WU. I hit cancel as I wasn't confident that unchecking the update was going to actually stop it from installing.

You'd think that someone would realize at some point you'll start driving away your customers if you over do it. They are well past that point now. I stopped visiting websites because of pop ups and ads becoming too intrusive, and while most aren't going to leave Windows over it, it's certainly not going to help keep your customer base happy with your product.
 
ToddW2 said:
So what desktop is everyone running on linux now
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XFCE on Arch. I also enjoy Openbox.

ManofGod said:
My experience says otherwise but, feel free to believe whatever you want. Having an SSD makes a significant difference.
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Oh I know SSD's speed things up (work laptops all have them). My point though is it took about 2 hours to upgrade the wife's laptop to Windows 10 originally. Update 1511 took the same amount of time. Something is wrong when an update to the OS takes as long as the OS install originally and it isn't the hardware.
 
nutzo said:
And I forecast even more people disabling windows update in windows 7.
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I did. I feel safer just cruising around minus a few updates then dealing with the ass-fuckery that is Win10.
 
I'm just manually updating now. Only security updates and I check each one to see what it's supposed to fix. I saw a new patch this afternoon that states it was to help simplify the transition too windows 10.

Sorry, MS, there is NOTHING about Windows 10 that interests me.
 
It's pretty easy to delete GWXUX (the nagware). It was driving me crazy as well.

Summary of steps:
- take complete ownership of the GWXUX directory in System 32
- delete!

Detail

Enjoy the back-to-normal running of your OS.
 
Just an update. Finally getting data on the "More Information" link in the Update page. Guess I started too early this morning and MS hadn't gotten the pages online for the updates. I'll let you slide this time MS. Still hid one of the updates that seemed nefarious.
 
If you run Windows 7 and get the nag, remove and hide these updates:

KB2952664
KB3035583
KB3068708
KB3075249
KB3080149

Unless more have been added today, those are the telemetry/nagware updates. Most of them are huge, you look at security updates and they are around 500kb, some of these are 30MB.
 
This is quite irritating. It's less of a problem in an Active Directory environment, since GWX and associated crap detects that the machine is domain joined and won't try to push you to Win10; not that this fact helps that vast majority of home users.

For Windows 7 (possibly 8/8.1) paste the following in a text file, save as a .cmd file and run as admin (or run each command separately in an elevated command prompt):
Code: 
wusa /uninstall /kb:971033  /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:2660075 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:2670838 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:2726535 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:2876229 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:2652664 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:2970228 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:2976987 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:2977759 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:2990214 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3008273 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3012973 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3014460 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3015249 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3021917 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3022345 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3035583 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3044374 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3046480 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3050265 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3050267 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3068707 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3068708 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3072318 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3075249 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3075835 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3080149 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3081452 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3083710 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3083711 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3090045 /norestart
Then run Windows Update manually find those KB numbers and mark them as hidden. Should stop nagging, at least until the next time MS updates whatever tomfoolery is involved in the WIn 10 upgrade experience.
 
I forgot, no editing in news. Some of those KBs are the GWX stuff, the others are 'telemetry' updates and updates to Windows Update itself to help the Win10 upgrade process. So if you're opposed to all things related to Win10, that's a relatively complete kill list.
 
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