Windows 10 Free Upgrade.....

I wouldn't be interested in renting software, but I wouldn't mind paying a reasonable subscription fee for security updates.
 
FastEddieB said:
I guess free qualifies as "sharply declined"! ;)
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Oh hah, I completely forgot that they changed their pricing model already. Perhaps more ammunition showing that Microsoft is unlikely to go subscription for consumer devices.

Sent from my Nexus 9 using Tapatalk
 
mkosmo said:
Yep... but generally that's to open putty ;)
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LOL. I had to give the PFY crap today when I was showing him how to set some stuff up, because of his love for his Win7 desktop and PuTTY.

We needed to see the output of ssh -vvvv to see why an with problem was happening and I had to explain to him that PuTTY was making him have to jump to another box to do it.

"Just set up a Linux box and contain that virus called Windows in a VM on it for the few things you need it for." Haha.

I don't think he yet realizes how much it slows him down to not just type commands. I was teaching so I had to be patient watching via a screen share. I was starting to want to walk to the kitchen while working from home and find a fork to stab my eyes out, waiting. :)

It's also weird to be the old guy who gets asked, "How did you learn how to do all that stuff in vi?" LOL.

I also had two people wanting to automate something today that I wrote a one-liner to do. Sigh. C'mon kids. Use the Force. You're sitting there staring at a shell prompt... Use it. Commands do not have to be run one at a time...

And I SUCK at it. That's the sad part.
 
denverpilot said:
LOL. I had to give the PFY crap today when I was showing him how to set some stuff up, because of his love for his Win7 desktop and PuTTY.

We needed to see the output of ssh -vvvv to see why an with problem was happening and I had to explain to him that PuTTY was making him have to jump to another box to do it.

"Just set up a Linux box and contain that virus called Windows in a VM on it for the few things you need it for." Haha.

I don't think he yet realizes how much it slows him down to not just type commands. I was teaching so I had to be patient watching via a screen share. I was starting to want to walk to the kitchen while working from home and find a fork to stab my eyes out, waiting. :)

It's also weird to be the old guy who gets asked, "How did you learn how to do all that stuff in vi?" LOL.

I also had two people wanting to automate something today that I wrote a one-liner to do. Sigh. C'mon kids. Use the Force. You're sitting there staring at a shell prompt... Use it. Commands do not have to be run one at a time...

And I SUCK at it. That's the sad part.
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Generally that's why I go to my single jump station and out from there... I'd love to have a Linux desktop, but company policy makes it a smidge difficult. I had one prior to our acquisition, but that fight wasn't one I was going to easily win afterwards. Plus, I had MS Office running under wine... but (as a result of our messaging/collab migration) getting Lotus Notes to run under wine? Screw that.

I'm a *nix and network admin at heart... stuck in a Windows world :(
 
Palmpilot said:
Just uninstall update KB 3035583. Then the next time that update is offered to you, select the option to hide it so that it won't be offered to you again.

If you have updates set to install automatically, I'm not sure how to prevent it from reinstalling itself.
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Thanks for the tip but uninstalling the KB accomplished nothing (I was not holding my breath, we're talking Microsoft here).
I had to manually delete the virus files once I googled how to get around the TrustedInstaller joke.

My updates are manual so I will be selectively declining the KB 3035583 next time. The fun part is that the description probably said something generic as all the others. Maybe "Security update". :)

I am really curious what happens once MS starts charging to keep Win10 on users' machines. I will want to see statistical data of how many accept their fate and swipe their credit card and how many will actually remove the OS. :)
 
mkosmo said:
You'll notice that not a single article speculating subscription-models has a source any newer than last year... well before MS announced that it'd be free.

Additionally, most of those sources are talking about the cancelled Windows 9 project. Microsoft has been talking about Win10 being free for a lot longer than that. What I've heard from the horse's mouth is that they're trying to adapt with the market and the consumer OS isn't where that is... Notice that Apple's OS costs have sharply declined, as well. MS is just trying to protect market share and get people up to newer things that they can support and sell you things for. Getting people off of XP is a huge concern there.
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Wow.

Not sure what you read, but the discussion of renting software has been going on for at least 3-4 years with discussion of possible rentals of Office and Windows all along the way. It has been clear for years that the Office model of deliberately incompatible file formats and increasingly arcane and superfluous features was coming to an end. The Europeans' 2006-2008 insistence on open document standards IMO pretty much drove the nails into the old Office strategy coffin. With Office headed towards rental it isn't much of a leap to forecast the same thing for Windows.

With regard to the "horse's mouth" as a former CEO I will tell you that the front line customer-facing people are only told what we want the customers to hear. Whatever they are told, they will blab, so they are not privy to much of the company strategy. The people that do have the full strategy are typically higher up in management (or staff jobs) with enough experience and discretion to give customers only the party line. So even if you are talking directly to Nadella you are only going to get what they want you to believe.

That said, there's absolutely no doubt that getting people off of XP is a priority. The number of people still on XP is proof positive that the model of using new features to sell upgrades is failing, as is the strategy of shipping slow and fat software in order to motivate sales of new computers and hence new copies of Office. Getting people off XP in order to position them to contribute future revenue is a no-brainer strategy. Giving away Win10 is not substantially different than your favorite drug dealing giving away samples of crack and heroin.

But let's turn the coin over: If, as you appear to believe, the "free" Win10 is an act of beneficent largess on MS's part, then how do you think they are planning to generate the revenue necessary to stay in business? By successfully selling Win11? I don't think so. Regarding "just trying to protect market share" that is easy to do by giving away the product. The question is still the same: Where will the revenue come from? 100% share with zero revenue does not a tenable business make.
 
airdale said:
But let's turn the coin over: If, as you appear to believe, the "free" Win10 is an act of beneficent largess on MS's part, then how do you think they are planning to generate the revenue necessary to stay in business? By successfully selling Win11? I don't think so. Regarding "just trying to protect market share" that is easy to do by giving away the product. The question is still the same: Where will the revenue come from? 100% share with zero revenue does not a tenable business make.
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It's not free forever. The free upgrade is a time limited affair. Also, I didn't say that the horse's mouth was a support person or sales engineer, did I? There is absolutely no benefit to going subscription for them at this point. It would keep their customers away from upgrading and would ultimately hurt them more than the small subscription fee they'd get. Remember, nobody knows they paid for Windows. Most people buy a computer where the OEM's contracted deal is rolled up in to the PC. Many people wouldn't stomach buying a computer and THEN having to pay for Windows on top of it. Windows is part of the computer as far as the masses are concerned.

Microsoft is in a unique position: Make sure the people know their product and the enterprises will buy it. It has been and will continue to be the enterprises that are their bread and butter -- not you and I as individual consumers.
 
mkosmo said:
... There is absolutely no benefit to going subscription for them at this point. ...
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I totally agree, the key phrase being "at this point." The desired prey must be in the trap before it is sprung. That's 1-3 years down the road. And, it's possible that you are right. I don't think so but only time will tell.
 
airdale said:
I totally agree, the key phrase being "at this point." The desired prey must be in the trap before it is sprung. That's 1-3 years down the road. And, it's possible that you are right. I don't think so but only time will tell.
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So how about a friendly wager? Bragging rights until the next major paradigm shift? Lol

Sent from my Nexus 9 using Tapatalk
 
CT4ME said:
The free upgrade is a limited time thing meant to expedite the adoption of 10. Based on the street noise, it's working. Best guess is that, in the future, Windows may be free, with extra features being unlocked via subscription. Makes sense... the "Freemium" business model. While I, and most customers, initially disliked the idea of the Office 365 subscription plan, it seems to be accepted (even liked) by most now.
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Count me as a happy 365 user. For one annual fee I have it on up to five computers, PC or Mac PLUS on two iPads and one iPhone. And a terabyte of storage each for up to five family members. Love OneDrive...makes all my stuff available on all my machines. Love it.
 
LDJones said:
Count me as a happy 365 user. For one annual fee I have it on up to five computers, PC or Mac PLUS on two iPads and one iPhone. And a terabyte of storage each for up to five family members. Love OneDrive...makes all my stuff available on all my machines. Love it.
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I gave up this year and also did it. Just for the Office updates and the magic updated Outlook for Mac that is *only* available via O365. It is not available anywhere else.

Problem is, I now have six machines. Haha. Hmm. It's hard deciding which machine doesn't get to play. I move the Office around once in a while when I need it on another.

No doubt they'll pull an Apple on that one soon and limit the number of times you can remove and reinstall it.

But for $99/year for five copies, and a Terrabyte of "I just want to throw this crap into a cloud drive" disk space, it's hard to beat. Way WAY better (but less integrated) than Apple's God-awful storage prices.

20GB of space at Apple, 15GB free at Dropbox, and 1TB at MSFT...
 
denverpilot said:
Paying for bug fixes created by poor coding, is not a good business model. :)
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Neither is renting consumer software, IMO.

But fortunately, I'm not in business, so I don't need a business model.
 
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My Win7 PC finally got the Windows 10 Reservation notification. Not sure why it took so long fort the icon to show up. I reserved a copy to burn to DVD if allowed to do so as I use my Win 7 PC for television as well as normal everyday computing with my 40 inch tv. Windows 10 no longer includes Windows Media Center so I cannot upgrade until I no longer want to use the machine for a cable tv PVR/DVR. Windows 8 still has Windows Media Center but I have read it is somewhat crippled.

David
 
I hate it when so-called "upgrades" remove features. :mad:
 
LDJones said:
Count me as a happy 365 user. ...
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Here is the issue: One day they might raise the price to the point where you want to drop your subscription. Unfortunately, your documents may only be open-able in the rental software, so giving up the subscription means you no longer have access to your own property. Your risk of lock-in is high. Even your estate will have to subscribe.

One way to mitigate this is to save documents only to standard file formats. Do not use any vendor-proprietary formats, no matter how much easier it might be. A better option, IMO, is to avoid rental software completely.
 
airdale said:
Here is the issue: One day they might raise the price to the point where you want to drop your subscription. Unfortunately, your documents may only be open-able in the rental software, so giving up the subscription means you no longer have access to your own property. Your risk of lock-in is high. Even your estate will have to subscribe.

One way to mitigate this is to save documents only to standard file formats. Do not use any vendor-proprietary formats, no matter how much easier it might be. A better option, IMO, is to avoid rental software completely.
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Yep. StarOffice / OpenOffice.org / Apache OpenOffice has been my standard for about 15 years. I haven't even had MS-Office installed for about 10 years.

Frankly, the fact that MS-Office still sells at all never ceases to surprise me, considering how competent OpenOffice is. It's a testimony to the power of inertia.

Rich
 
RJM62 said:
Yep. StarOffice / OpenOffice.org / Apache OpenOffice has been my standard for about 15 years. I haven't even had MS-Office installed for about 10 years.

Frankly, the fact that MS-Office still sells at all never ceases to surprise me, considering how competent OpenOffice is. It's a testimony to the power of inertia.

Rich
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You can call it inertia if you want. in my case, I've done customizations to Office since the time I converted my WordPerfect macros to Word code 20 years ago. I like LibreOffice a lot and recommend it to friends all the time as an alternative. But for me, I have no desire to make my life more difficult by having to relearn a new coding language and rewrite enough of my code to make it do what I want.

I also found Office 365 to be is a surprisingly good deal. The annual subscription includes a terabyte of cloud storage. For one user, that's substantially less per year with Office than the equivalent amount of storage on DropBox.
 
airdale said:
Here is the issue: One day they might raise the price to the point where you want to drop your subscription. Unfortunately, your documents may only be open-able in the rental software, so giving up the subscription means you no longer have access to your own property. Your risk of lock-in is high. Even your estate will have to subscribe.
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Huh?

Yes, if MS decided to change its filetype to a specification that was completely unreadable by anything else (a real throwback to what didn't work too well in 1988), I would stop using my subscription and make the jump. Kind of tough these days when the docs are essential xml and I personally think the likelihood of that is pretty much nil.

All of the alternatives to Office, especially the free open source ones, have as their single biggest "selling" point the ability to read and write documents in the same format as Word, a virtual necessity unless you never share documents in their native format.
 
midlifeflyer said:
Huh?

Yes, if MS decided to change its filetype to a specification that was completely unreadable by anything else (a real throwback to what didn't work too well in 1988), I would stop using my subscription and make the jump. Kind of tough these days when the docs are essential xml and I personally think the likelihood of that is pretty much nil.

All of the alternatives to Office, especially the free open source ones, have as their single biggest "selling" point the ability to read and write documents in the same format as Word, a virtual necessity unless you never share documents in their native format.
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All true. As long as there is third party software that can read the files, you are not locked in. As long a MS perceives that it is in their interest to maintain compatibility, you are not locked in. If one day they decide to encrypt your files in the name of security (of course), you are screwed. What are the odds? I have no idea, but the probability is not zero.
 
airdale said:
All true. As long as there is third party software that can read the files, you are not locked in. As long a MS perceives that it is in their interest to maintain compatibility, you are not locked in. If one day they decide to encrypt your files in the name of security (of course), you are screwed. What are the odds? I have no idea, but the probability is not zero.
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I think the probability that MS will steal your property by encrypting it in a way that prevents you from getting to it to it ever again without paying them forever is, if not zero, very close to it.
 
airdale said:
Here is the issue: One day they might raise the price to the point where you want to drop your subscription. Unfortunately, your documents may only be open-able in the rental software, so giving up the subscription means you no longer have access to your own property. Your risk of lock-in is high. Even your estate will have to subscribe.

One way to mitigate this is to save documents only to standard file formats. Do not use any vendor-proprietary formats, no matter how much easier it might be. A better option, IMO, is to avoid rental software completely.
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I don't live with that paranoia. Microsoft file formats are some of the most widely supported so I'll never lose sleep over that issue. OpenOffice opens them just fine.
 
Office 365 has been working nicely for me. I basically sponge off of other people's multi user licenses when I install it on the boat, and that one license carries across all my platforms including iOS. I can basically work any file from any computer anywhere on the Internet.
 
flhrci said:
My Win7 PC finally got the Windows 10 Reservation notification. Not sure why it took so long fort the icon to show up. I reserved a copy to burn to DVD if allowed to do so as I use my Win 7 PC for television as well as normal everyday computing with my 40 inch tv. Windows 10 no longer includes Windows Media Center so I cannot upgrade until I no longer want to use the machine for a cable tv PVR/DVR. Windows 8 still has Windows Media Center but I have read it is somewhat crippled.

David
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I'm trying to figure out if I want to keep my media center on 7 or upgrade to 10 and find other software. I'd love something with better Netflix integration. Also the prime add in is pretty crappy.
 
Hello all. Has anyone noticed that Windows 7 (for me, I have Windows 7) been trying to upgrade to Windows 10 today automatically without my permission?

It first started that my computer needs to shutdown to install updates. I went to Windows Update, and it showed no important updates needed to be installed. So I shutdown while my computer is installing an update I didn't know about at the time. After I shut down and rebooted, I found out that it tried to install Windows 10 Home without my knowledge but it failed to install. It tried to install Windows 10 Home by itself two more times throughout the day but to no success.

I do not want Windows 10 at all. I tried unchecking the recommended update box where it gives me recommended updates the same way I receive important update after it tried to install Windows 10 Home the first time but it still tried to install Windows 10 Home two more times today but still failed.

Does anyone with Windows 7 or Windows 8 possibly too have the same problem as I did today? Is there a way to not be forced to install Windows 10 Home?
 
Go into Windows Update, view your update history, and uninstall update KB3035573. Then hide the update so it stops trying to reinstall.

Or...

Open Regedit, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Gwx, create a new REG_DWORD value named DisableGwx, and assign the value as 1.

The first method is better if you may some day want to install 10. If you do decide you want it, you just reinstall the update, and it will download and install.

The second method is better if you are absolutely, 100 percent certain that you never want 10. It will never bother you again. But you will have to delete that entry from the registry if you ever change your mind; so maybe write it down somewhere in case you do.

The force with which MS is pushing this freebie is the main reason I don't want it. Anyone pushing something free that hard has got to be up to no good. Unfortunately, now that I finally stopped MS from pushing it, HP's support thingy is pushing it. I think I have that disabled now, too. It hasn't bothered me since this morning.

Rich
 
it's what computers crave.

:-/
 
I have noticed it. There are 8 failures in the update history. What I suspect is going on is that it is checking to see if the machine is allowed to be upgraded, as in Microsoft is giving permission. My Mom's laptop yesterday asked for permission to upgrade itself but the machine is so slow, I gave up on it after half an hour. It said it would do 10 seconds of prep work then have me approve the license agreement, then install.

As far as I know it can't automatically upgrade the system without final approval from the user.

I am going to install it temporarily after I image my SSD just to get the free license key, then revert back to win 7 because Win 10 will delete Windows Media Center which I use for recording tv off my cable card. Losing that capability will cost me $25 a month more for a DVR from Time Warner.


David
 
I hate when an "upgrade" removes features.
 
RJM62 said:
Go into Windows Update, view your update history, and uninstall update KB3035573. Then hide the update so it stops trying to reinstall.



Rich
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Can you be more specific about 'hide' the upgrade? I can unistall the KB, but not sure what you mean about hiding it?

thx.
 
Interesting, I'm not getting any of this running 8.1 and don't have anything blocked.
 
docmirror said:
Can you be more specific about 'hide' the upgrade? I can unistall the KB, but not sure what you mean about hiding it?

thx.
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When the update is offered to you again in Windows Update, if you right-click the update, there's an option to hide it, so that it will not keep being offered to you every time.
 
docmirror said:
Can you be more specific about 'hide' the upgrade? I can unistall the KB, but not sure what you mean about hiding it?

thx.
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Once you uninstall it, it will reappear in the Available Updates display. You can uncheck it, and then hide it (Right Click -> Hide Update), so you don't accidentally check it and install it.

Rich
 

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I signed up for it months ago and have never been prompted or received an email with a link.
 
I was under the impression you had to opt for the upgrade. I responded on at least three computers. I have completed the upgrade on my laptop and have been evaluating whether to move ahead with the other computers. I have not been pushed to upgrade those machines as yet.
 
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