Tuesday, June 28, 2016

More on W10

The BBC has an interesting piece on the W10 litigation.

...her Windows 7 computer had automatically tried to update itself to Windows 10 without her permission. She said the update had made her machine unstable, leaving her unable to use it to run her business. Microsoft said it had dropped its appeal to save on legal costs. Microsoft has been aggressively pushing the latest version of its widely used operating system, which is currently available as a free download for computers running Windows 7 and 8. However, many people have chosen not to upgrade, because they are running old hardware, have software that does not run on Windows 10, are concerned over the software's tracking features, or simply do not want it.
In February, the company bundled Windows 10 in with its security updates and made it a "recommended update", which meant it was automatically downloaded and installed unless blocked by the user. Some people accused the company of trying to "trick" customers into installing the update.

Indeed, W10 in my experience has several negatives:

1. It clobbers existing activations on certain products. I had an expensive Chem Draw system and it wiped out my registration.

2. It wipes out drivers. Several of my systems were disabled.

3. It disables older SW. Again this was the case with even old Microsoft SW.

I have one machine left used on a lab bench for imaging and running W7. I have disabled all updates for fear of the above because Dell says it is not compatible with W10. Microsoft has the arrogance in my opinion that no matter what they do to the users who have paid for the systems they rely upon that they can do whatever!

This should some FTC issue. But then again it is an election year and perhaps they are looking for lobbying jobs.