Windows 10?

[rlg118]

Originally Posted by Isegrim

No Windows 10 is not evil, but the irresponsible american attitude towards personal data and privacy is. And Windows 10 is just a another tool of it ...

... like Facebook, Twitter, Google, ad nauseum.

[9876543210]

rig118,

Originally Posted by rlg118

... like Facebook, Twitter, Google, ad nauseum.

Which is why I don't use any of those. You want my personal data? You're going to pay me a lot of money for it. And I mean a lot of money.

Lots of people today seem to think that should be free. Fu%k that. Don't use any of those and things will change.

[lagerlout]

Originally Posted by 9876543210

rig118,



Which is why I don't use any of those. You want my personal data? You're going to pay me a lot of money for it. And I mean a lot of money.

Lots of people today seem to think that should be free. Fu%k that. Don't use any of those and things will change.

+1 Quite a few in my family give me grief for refusing to use Facecrap etc & I have just told Yahoo to shove it for demanding I change a perfectly safe password & insisting on a mobile phone number

Screw them

[buttsie]

15 Windows 10 problems - and how to fix them

7 Jul, 2016

http://www.itpro.co.uk/operating-sys...-to-fix-them-5


Should we take the free Win10 Home upgrade or pay for Pro?
Posted on July 24th, 2016 at 16:37

Interesting comment in response to this link - about cortana and its ability to
hear & record what your doing around your computer

https://www.askwoody.com/tag/windows-10-upgrade/


Review: Windows 10 Anniversary Update fails to excite

By Woody Leonhard

InfoWorld | Jul 20, 2016

http://www.infoworld.com/article/309...to-excite.html

[Moon Raker]

The Windows 10 upgrade 'reminder' has just got more insistent. After booting up my Win 8.1 laptop today I get locked out to a full-size green screen with the message 'Sorry to interrupt but this is important. Windows 10 free upgrade offer ends on 29 July'. Options are 'do not notify me again', 'upgrade now' or 'remind me later'. Unlike previous nagware this cannot be removed via Task Manager/end task because of the full-screen display. Clicking on 'do not notify me again' gets rid of it but not before a further message appears giving you a chance to change your mind. Truly reprehensible behaviour from MS. I will never, ever upgrade to W10 after the irritating MS hard sell techniques.

[Isegrim]

Reminds me of this trojan:



(Explanation:https://translate.google.com/transla...-text=&act=url )

If I were a cyber criminal (or Microsoft ) I would place some malware like this after the free update period ends urging people to update to Windows 10. What do you think how many would buy a version. The world is full of fools. And Microsoft paved the way ...

[Rick Danger]

No one is putting a gun to your head and saying you MUST USE Facebook, Twitter, Bing, or Google.

However, burying "data collection" in the operating system of your computer, then giving you no way to opt out of it, or making it so that the next upgrade will simply turn those settings back on is reprehensible.

That's what makes Windows 10 so objectionable..........among other things.

Microsoft's grand plan: A "billion Windows 10 devices...." gathering data, tracking your physical location, able to access your webcam, even listening (via Cortana) to anything you say. Who gets to see this data? How long will it be retained? If there's a data breach will Microsoft admit it? What if a government demands access?

Lord, not even George Orwell could have envisioned this............

Grieving for the people of Germany

[Isegrim]

And all of this doubtable behaviour is probably only a preview of the 'improvements' Microsoft will install in further 'upgrades' when enough users fell for their honeypot ...

[Rick Danger]

Another take on the Windows 10 anniversary, this time from Nick Heath at TechRepublic.com

What I found interesting about this article is that despite their bungling attempts to impact the global smartphone market, first with the failed Windows/Nokia partnership under Steve Ballmer (Oh he who predicted that the iPhone would never be a success), the lackluster sales of Windows 8 Phone, and the even more anemic sales of Windows 10 phones, Redmond is going to throw good money after bad in yet another attempt to unseat the dominance of Apple and Android. Good luck with that.

Mister A435843 who contributed greatly to this thread pointed out in many of his posts that the weakness of Windows 10 lays in Microsoft's attempt to make it a "universal" operating system, running on desktops, laptops, tablets, gaming consoles, and smartphones. So the rocket scientists at Redmond have taken the course of "dumming down" Windows and Windows apps on PC platforms in order to insure such functionality. This is known as Universal Windows Platform (UWP). Much of this was driven by strategies built around Windows 10 Phone.

It was the "dumming down" of games released under Windows 10 to fit Microsoft's UWP masterplan that had gamers crying foul last year. Also software developers were not happy with having to support developing apps under both UWP and non-UWP guidelines, not to mention that Microsoft was taking a cut of the developers revenues for each UWP compatible app they released.

Under Ballmer Microsoft attempted to take on the Apple iPod with it's own media player, the Zune. Despite (at the time) over 110 million iPods sold world-wide, Ballmer thought Microsoft could compete. Wrong. Then the attempts to grab marketshare from Apple and Samsung by partnering with Nokia to sell Windows Phone. At it's peak, Windows Phone represented only 2.3% of the smartphone market. Bring in Satya Nadella and a new management team and attempt to relaunch Windows Phone under Windows 10. After watching it's marketshare erode to around 1% they announced they were moving away from Windows Phone. Now they intend to launch a new line of smartphones next year.

When Microsoft decommitted to Windows 10 Phone earlier this year it was hoped that perhaps Windows 10 as a full power desktop operating system might actually happen after all. But the fact that Redmond is still planning new efforts in the smartphone market, despite nearly a decade of futility opens up questions about their strategic vision all over again.

Change the leadership team but keep moving in the same failed direction? The smartphone marketplace has already voted - with it's wallets and pocketbooks. Apparently Microsoft can't recognize that the ship has long since sailed. A great definition of "FUTILITY".


TechRepublic
Enterprise Software

Windows 10 one year on: Has it been a success for Microsoft?
How has Microsoft handled the first year in the life of its flagship OS and what does the future hold?

By Nick Heath
July 25, 2016, 6:00 AM PST

Since releasing Windows 10 almost one year ago, Microsoft has pushed hard to get Windows users to upgrade, to the point where its heavy-handed tactics drew sharp criticism.

But despite that drive, Microsoft recently admitted that — while Windows 10 is now used on some 350 million devices — the firm will likely miss its target for one billion devices to be running the OS by the end of summer 2018.

Microsoft is blaming sluggish sales of Windows 10 phones for the shortfall, with the company shifting its focus away from Windows on phones until the expected launch of the Surface Phone next year.

"What's changed is that the phone business has not has not evolved in the way that Microsoft expected it to," said Al Gillen, GVP of enterprise infrastructure at analyst house IDC.

"They've arguably lost a pretty significant number, probably in the order of multiple hundreds of millions of phones that are not going to be sold running Windows 10."

But how much of a problem is it for Microsoft to miss its self-imposed deadline? If Windows 10 is on 800 million devices instead of one billion by summer 2018 that isn't an issue in itself, says Gillen. What's more of a problem, he said, is that Windows 10's lacklustre performance on mobile means adoption of the OS will primarily be driven by the PC market, which has been in decline for years.

"They have a contracting market opportunity, rather than an exploding market opportunity," he said.

This lack of mobile take-up weakens the appeal of a key Windows 10 feature that Microsoft used to sell the OS to developers and users, the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app. While Microsoft says it is relatively easy for developers to turn a desktop UWP app into a mobile one, the motivation to do so is lessened if relatively few people use Windows 10 phones.

Developers are likely to prioritise Android and iOS devices and, while still developing for Windows PCs, the Windows platform will probably be "not nearly as important as these mobile devices are", said Gillen.

Windows 10 is playing catch-up with the mobile platforms when it comes to user numbers, said Richard Edwards, principal research analyst with Ovum.

"Developers will only become interested in Microsoft if it can point to a large, addressable audience. Apple has approximately 900 million active iOS devices in circulation — the company reported it had sold 1 billion iOS devices back in January — so Microsoft needs to be in the same ballpark," he said.

This situation doesn't necessarily put Microsoft as a whole on the back foot, however, according to IDC's Gillen.

"Now this is a problem for Windows and for the Windows applications but it isn't necessarily a problem for the larger Microsoft," said Gillen, citing Microsoft's willingness to integrate Microsoft services such as Azure Active Directory and applications such as Office with Android and iOS — rather than locking everything to Windows.

Microsoft does seem to have demoted the importance of Windows to its business, said Steve Kleynhans, VP for the mobile and client computing group at Gartner, as the company pursues its "cloud first" strategy.

"In the end Windows is just one of their products that support their overall cloud initiative and if they can't win the mobile space with Windows they'll go after it with something else," he said.

"This is not the old Microsoft where everything was focused on 'Windows has to be a success'. Windows used to be the lead player at Microsoft, Windows is now just one of the supporting characters."

Will Microsoft's aggression in pushing Windows 10 damage the firm?
Microsoft made some controversial choices in how it pushed home users of Windows 7 and 8.1 to upgrade to Windows 10.

Since the offer of a free upgrade launched last year, Microsoft has become increasingly aggressive in its attempts to persuade people to switch, first making the upgrade process begin automatically on most home machines and then temporarily making it easier to inadvertently accept the upgrade.

The issue of unwanted upgrades even ended up in court, with a judgement in a small claims court that Microsoft should pay $10,000 to Teri Goldstein, a travel agent based in Sausalito, California, who said an unwanted Windows 10 upgrade made her PC unstable.

But will these controversies over how Microsoft pushed upgrades onto users cause any long-term damage to the firms reputation? Probably not, says Gartner's Kleynhans.

"I think the general populace will generally forget a lot of that stuff, I don't think it's permanent damage. People will forget that there ever was a free upgrade within a few months," he said.

"It was unfortunate that Microsoft was quite as aggressive as they were. I think you'll see that that they will learn from all of these different things and you'll see them do things differently in the future."

What's next for Windows 10 and can you keep running Windows 7?
Microsoft has said that Windows 10 will cease to be available as a free upgrade to Windows 7 and Windows 8 users on July 29th.

After this point, consumer take-up of Windows 10 will slow down and businesses will begin to deploy the OS in earnest, according to Forrester principal analyst JP Gownder.

"2017 will be a big year for enterprise upgrades. Many organizations are already piloting Windows 10 devices, but in 2017 they will be driven by security concerns," said Gownder, citing the OS' support for security features such as application containerization, faster updates and anti-malware instructions built into Intel's recent Skylake processors.

IDC's Gillen agreed that firms would likely begin the process of rolling out Windows 10 within the next eight months, although he said the process could take businesses up to four years to complete.

From mid-2018, firms will have an extra incentive to deploy new PCs with Windows 10, rather than downgrading them to an earlier OS, as from this point Microsoft will no longer deliver updates to Skylake PCs running Windows 7 or 8.1, aside from critical patches.

Generally businesses are talking about "wanting to get through this migration quicker then they've done it in the past", according to Gartner's Kleynhans.

This greater urgency to switch every machine to Windows 10 stems from a desire to take full advantage of the new security and management features in the OS, he said.

"For enterprise, if you like the security, and that's the reason you're going [to Windows 10], you have to get that security across all your machines as quickly as you can," he said, stressing that businesses were keen to use Enterprise edition security features such as Credential Guard, which offers additional protection for login details, and Device Guard, which allows devices to be restricted to only running trusted software.

For home users who don't want to upgrade to Windows 10, however, IDC's Gillen sees no reason why they shouldn't continue using Windows 7 until Microsoft stops patching it against security flaws.

"There's no downside really of using Windows 7 through 2020 until you get to the point where you're out of extended support," he said.

Grieving for the people of Germany

[Rick Danger]

Originally Posted by Moon Raker

The Windows 10 upgrade 'reminder' has just got more insistent. After booting up my Win 8.1 laptop today I get locked out to a full-size green screen with the message 'Sorry to interrupt but this is important. Windows 10 free upgrade offer ends on 29 July'.

If you still have "Automatic Update" selected under Windows 7 or 8.1 (which you should have turned off LONG AGO), or you chose the upgrade KB3173040, you get the full screen Window 10 upgrade nonesense.....


Win7 and 8.1 patch KB 3173040 throws full-screen Win10 upgrade warning
Sorry to interrupt, but this is important ... or so says Microsoft

By Woody Leonhard
InfoWorld | Jun 30, 2016

Microsoft just released yet another Win10 upgrade nag system, disguised as a "Recommended" patch for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8.1 systems.

According to the KB 3173040 article, if you have Windows set to automatically install updates, and have the Windows Update "Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them" box checked, your machine will suddenly sprout a full-screen purple message that says:

Sorry to interrupt, but this is important.

Windows 10 free upgrade offer ends July 29.

Microsoft recommends upgrading to Windows 10 -- the most secure Windows ever built. The upgrade is free and you can easily roll-back to your current operating system within 31 days if you decide Windows 10 is not right for you. We'll check for compatibility before starting the upgrade. Over 300 million people have upgraded. Upgrade your PC before the offer ends!

Windows 7 and 8.1 customers are offered four choices:

Upgrade now
Remind me later
Notify me three more times
Do not notify me again

Notably, there is no "X" in the upper right corner. There's also no indication if any other combination of keys, clicks or swipes might simply tell the full-screen ad to buzz off.

For all two of you who didn't know that Microsoft wants you to upgrade to Windows 10, this should serve as a welcome reminder.

The KB article says the full-page ad won't appear if you have a "recent version" of the Get Windows 10 app installed, if your machine is known to be incompatible with Win10, or if you have previously rolled back from Win10 to your earlier operating system. Also, we're promised that those of you who have run GWX Control Panel, Never10, or manually set the appropriate registry keys won't see the ad.

The download weighs in at a hefty 5.5 MB.

No, I don't make this stuff up. You have to wonder how many TV weather announcers, how many broadcasting game players, and how many unattended kiosks will suddenly find themselves festooned in Microsoft upgrade purple. I predict a field day in the mainstream press by tomorrow.

There was a second patch released an hour ago, as well, KB 3163589. It's for Win7 customers who aren't using Win7 SP1, and for Win8 users who aren't running Win 8.1. There's no information about Windows 8.1 users who haven't installed the Win 8.1 Update 1.

Grieving for the people of Germany