Microsoft Reduces Windows 10 Roll-Back Grace Period

Megalith

Megalith

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PSA: If you decide that you hate Windows 10, you’ve only got 10 days instead of 30 now to roll back. This also applies to reverting to a previous build of Windows 10 for testers participating in the Insider program.

With last week's Anniversary Update, aka version 1607, the 30 days were reduced to 10. (Microsoft identifies its major upgrades using numerals representing year and month of the release.) Microsoft said that the behind-the-scenes change had been triggered by data gleaned from the voluminous telemetry it collects from Windows 10 devices. "Based on our user research, we noticed most users who choose to go back to a previous version of Windows do it within the first several days," a spokesman said in an email. "As such, we changed the setting to 10 days to free storage space used by previous copies."
 
Technically this is about rolling back to a previous version of Windows 10, not from Windows 10 back to 7/8/8.1. I think 10 days is enough to determine if an update fucked up your system or not.
 
MavericK said:
Technically this is about rolling back to a previous version of Windows 10, not from Windows 10 back to 7/8/8.1. I think 10 days is enough to determine if an update fucked up your system or not.
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Nope - also applies to upgrades as per the article:

Users who upgraded to Windows 10 were able to roll back to the preceding Windows as long as they did so within 30 days. To make that possible, Microsoft stored the older operating system in a special folder on the device's drive, consuming up to 5GB of storage space. After the grace period expired, the folder's contents were deleted.
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Make total sens.e we all know that if most users go bakc within a few days its impossible to do that when the time period is 30 days...
 
GuruX said:
Nope - also applies to upgrades as per the article:
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Okay, but is it applied retroactively or going forward? Because we are already almost 10 days out from the upgrade expiration, so theoretically there is no more upgrading beyond that point, making the change sort of moot in terms of upgrades.
 
I'm sure its already been mentioned but it seems it might still be possible to upgrade to win 10 for the foreseeable future for free.

Windows 10 upgrade for assistive technology users

I mention this for those that might want to opt out if possible and see what happens. Who knows how long this will last, so opt out at your own risk if necessary!

(edit: not sure if theirs a moral implication here or not)
 
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viscountalpha said:
A surprise to no one. As I have stated before windows 10 is looking worse and worse with each update.
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It was a surprise to me. If a large publicly traded company tells me in writing, "you can try our product; don't worry, you can go back to the old version for 30 days," I actually feel pretty confident that I'll be able to enjoy the conditions that they volunteered to offer. Telling me that I have now less days, after I already took them up on their offer and started testing makes me feel seriously Landocalrissianed.
 
lironmiron said:
It was a surprise to me. If a large publicly traded company tells me in writing, "you can try our product; don't worry, you can go back to the old version for 30 days," I actually feel pretty confident that I'll be able to enjoy the conditions that they volunteered to offer. Telling me that I have now less days, after I already took them up on their offer and started testing makes me feel seriously Landocalrissianed.
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They're giving the customers what they want - the people who liked it wanted their disk space back sooner, and the people who didn't like it rolled back almost immediately. The data on how fast people rolled back must have been pretty compelling for them to cut it to a third of the previous time.

SvenBent said:
Make total sens.e we all know that if most users go bakc within a few days its impossible to do that when the time period is 30 days...
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What?
 
I rolled back my surface pro 2. It didn't feel right with windows 10.

The upgrade also took like 6 hours... downgrade took 20? minutes or less.

Win10 for my desktop has been mostly OK so far though.
 
The smallest hdd you can get in a new pc is ~1TB. The rollback files in windows.old can be manually deleted if you need to recover that space. Microsoft is always looking out for us.

The only sensible thing is to decrease the rollback period to 10 seconds. Microsofts pr department could spin that as an ECO feature, because a hdd that just installed a new os is warmed up and a warm hdd is more efficient than a cold one. So the file deletion would take less electricity.
 
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lironmiron said:
It was a surprise to me. If a large publicly traded company tells me in writing, "you can try our product; don't worry, you can go back to the old version for 30 days," I actually feel pretty confident that I'll be able to enjoy the conditions that they volunteered to offer. Telling me that I have now less days, after I already took them up on their offer and started testing makes me feel seriously Landocalrissianed.
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Let that be a taste of things to come.
 
skydriver said:
I'm sure its already been mentioned but it seems it might still be possible to upgrade to win 10 for the foreseeable future for free.

Windows 10 upgrade for assistive technology users

I mention this for those that might want to opt out if possible and see what happens. Who knows how long this will last, so opt out at your own risk if necessary!

(edit: not sure if theirs a moral implication here or not)
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There is absolutely nothing immoral with upgrading this way.
 
Jim Kim said:
There is absolutely nothing immoral with upgrading this way.
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Their QA spells it out, they're totally cool with it, regardless of what technologies you use and how much. Which means you open Magnifier or text to speech once and you qualify. I honestly feel like it's intentional.
 
Jim Kim said:
The smallest hdd you can get in a new pc is ~1TB. The rollback files in windows.old can be manually deleted if you need to recover that space.
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Some pcs have small ssds; some of the old laptops I upgraded from windows 7 had tiny hard drives too. Maybe they should have done it on a sliding scale; 60gb or less of total space = 10 seconds as you propose. Up to 250 GB, 10 days; more than that, just leave it forever, who cares.
 
Quix said:
Their QA spells it out, they're totally cool with it, regardless of what technologies you use and how much. Which means you open Magnifier or text to speech once and you qualify. I honestly feel like it's intentional.
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Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
 
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I "rolled back" after 11 months. I just couldn't take it anymore. After the shit they pulled with the anniversary update I'm twice as glad as I was when I did it.

Yeah, good for me. :)
 
viscountalpha said:
A surprise to no one. As I have stated before windows 10 is looking worse and worse with each update.
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I'm a Linux user myself but Windows 10 isn't a bad OS. It just has a lot of bad policies that makes you feel like you don't own the computer no more. Windows updates are resetting your settings, specifically spying settings, and reinstalling software you removed. It updates without your consent. Removes Windows Media Center. Has compatibility issues with certainly drivers and software.

Once you have it working it does a pretty good job, but nothing different than Windows 7.
 
Users who upgraded to Windows 10 were able to roll back to the preceding Windows as long as they did so within 30 days. To make that possible, Microsoft stored the older operating system in a special folder on the device's drive, consuming up to 5GB of storage space. After the grace period expired, the folder's contents were deleted.
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Every one that I have upgraded and then done the drive cleanup, the Previous OS cleanup by itself was 14+ GB.

Is MS saying that they don't actually auto run the Previous OS cleanup and just make it auto delete the one folder?
 
Yeah. My laptop battery time is now useless. 9 hours to 4. = ( I really dont want to use win8.1 though...
 
If they're willing to go this far, the next step - which they could easily take - is to invalidate licenses for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 that were used to take advantage of the free upgrade to Windows 10 but continue to be used more than 10/30 days after the upgrade, or they could flat out invalidate the Windows 10 digital entitlement that was granted when the 7/8/8.1 license(s) were used to claim the free upgrade after 10/30 days (meaning you're unable to "reserve" the free upgrade as many of us did for various reasons but continue to use 7/8/8.1).

If they did this with the reduction from 30 to 10 days then I have no reason to believe they won't go the extra step to do some invalidation of the surrendered licenses or the digital entitlements. It would be nothing for them to implement this type of action, mere lines of code working inside Windows Update.

At this point I'm almost expecting this type of action so, don't be surprised if it actually happens. ;)
 
DukenukemX said:
I'm a Linux user myself but Windows 10 isn't a bad OS. It just has a lot of bad policies that makes you feel like you don't own the computer no more. Windows updates are resetting your settings, specifically spying settings, and reinstalling software you removed. It updates without your consent. Removes Windows Media Center. Has compatibility issues with certainly drivers and software.

Once you have it working it does a pretty good job, but nothing different than Windows 7.
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I'm on Windows 7 and this is my basic impression. I think Win10 will add a few things for multimedia users / gamers, but it's not worth the cost of giving up control over my system. I'll probably upgrade to it a couple years down the line, if I can find a hacked up version that removes all the intrusive stuff. The way they have it now, they're practically daring power users to try and pirate the Enterprise edition.
 
Bait & switch ...

Not sure if this is an improvement over MS's previous operational moto of "embrace, extent, extinguish"
 
MavericK said:
Okay, but is it applied retroactively or going forward? Because we are already almost 10 days out from the upgrade expiration, so theoretically there is no more upgrading beyond that point, making the change sort of moot in terms of upgrades.
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As I understand it, If you upgraded from 7/8 at the end of the offer, and have had the Anniversary update installed since, if you choose to rollback, you'll get last weeks version of Windows 10, not 7/8, so it might not matter either way :eek:
 
skydriver said:
I'm sure its already been mentioned but it seems it might still be possible to upgrade to win 10 for the foreseeable future for free.

Windows 10 upgrade for assistive technology users

I mention this for those that might want to opt out if possible and see what happens. Who knows how long this will last, so opt out at your own risk if necessary!

(edit: not sure if theirs a moral implication here or not)
Click to expand...
I used my original release win 10 dvd (released July 2015, whatever that version was) on a donated Win 7 machine just last friday and it activated off the already activated win 7 install and everything's working great.

Granted, this may be some oversight of Microsoft's.
 
has Microsoft gone insane with Windows 10?...what the hell is wrong with them?...why are they pushing this so hard like the world is going to end...they've never done this before with any previous OS...bring back Bill Gates
 
polonyc2 said:
has Microsoft gone insane with Windows 10?...what the hell is wrong with them?...why are they pushing this so hard like the world is going to end...they've never done this before with any previous OS...bring back Bill Gates
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They saw how much money google was making off of search and whatever else they do and wanted some of that cash for themselves. We're already a captive audience at this point and until what they are doing is outlawed, they'll continue doing it.
 
DocSavage said:
I used my original release win 10 dvd (released July 2015, whatever that version was) on a donated Win 7 machine just last friday and it activated off the already activated win 7 install and everything's working great.

Granted, this may be some oversight of Microsoft's.
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Nice, I haven't tried the old ISO since all I have been doing it on lately is Dell machines.

I kept the old ISO around just in case.
 
cyclone3d said:
Nice, I haven't tried the old ISO since all I have been doing it on lately is Dell machines.

I kept the old ISO around just in case.
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Oh, just make sure you check the "Not right now" box on the "Download and install updates" question.
 
cyclone3d said:
Nice, I haven't tried the old ISO since all I have been doing it on lately is Dell machines.

I kept the old ISO around just in case.
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Strangely enough Microsoft still have the old dvd along with v1511 and v1607 on their VLSC site.
 
ManofGod said:
Free upgrades are no longer available so the article is not correct.
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Has it been 30 days since it was available, because the article makes it sound like the changes are retroactive. Of course if they replaced peoples win 7/8/8.1 rollback data with the non anniversary edition of 10 like someone suggested then some people didn't even get 10 days much less the 30 days they were promised(I did an update for someone on the 28th and it still said 30 days).
 
Ebernanut said:
Has it been 30 days since it was available, because the article makes it sound like the changes are retroactive. Of course if they replaced peoples win 7/8/8.1 rollback data with the non anniversary edition of 10 like someone suggested then some people didn't even get 10 days much less the 30 days they were promised(I did an update for someone on the 28th and it still said 30 days).
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I think the point is that since the Anniversary Update come out of the free upgrade period, the new 10 days would have minimal effect of 7/8.x users wanting to roll back to 7/8.x because they would have lost that ability by first going to 1511 and then 1607. So this really only effects rollbacks of the Anniversary Update back to 1511.
 
I love how they keep getting away with asking you to agree to something, and then changing the terms after you have agreed.

Anyone else does that and they get taken to court. (Or, in the wild west, shot)
 
heatlesssun said:
I think the point is that since the Anniversary Update come out of the free upgrade period, the new 10 days would have minimal effect of 7/8.x users wanting to roll back to 7/8.x because they would have lost that ability by first going to 1511 and then 1607. So this really only effects rollbacks of the Anniversary Update back to 1511.
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That sounds worse not better. It just means that some people didn't even get 10 days much less the the 30 days they were told they had. When I did the upgrade on the 28th it specifically said that I had 30 days to rollback if I decided I didn't want it, if I hadn't created an image of the Win 7 install it sounds like I would have had 5 days.
 
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