umm…maybe try reading the post immediately above yours.?
While Papsett slept, his computer was raped by Microsoft, and had to be rushed to the emergency room— where it remains in a coma, unable to communicate with the outside world, although there remains hope that he will be able to return to a normal life.
Imagine if, say, the electric company decided to upgrade the transformers in your neighborhood from 110 volts to 240 volts.
Hey, it’s an upgrade!!!.. it must be good!!!
The whole world uses 240 volts, so why shouldnt you? What could possibly go wrong?
They remind me of this guy we used to have at a company where I worked, who would send emails every three months reminding people that “the IT helpdesk email isn’t monitored” and whining that people were still sending “please help me, IThelpdesk” emails to the IThelpdesk email. What imbeciles, right, being unable to comprehend that IThelpdesk(at)company.com was not monitored. I mean, really!!!
Let’s see: if there are thousands of corporations which refuse to upgrade tooth and nail, among other things because of backwards compatibility issues (not just OP but also Office and other MS products), and if lots of domestic customers will only upgrade OP when they get a new computer, maybe you should
a) do something about those compatibility issues. I realize you’ve probably lost the specs if you ever had them, but Jesus weeps, is it so difficult to add “open several old files with a bunch of fancy formatting features and make sure they open all right” to the tests? I wrote my thesis in a MS program, and it has been unopenable for over a decade; the current electronic version is a scan of the printouts, because the original electronic version could not be opened by newer versions of the same program I used to write it. Yeehaw.
b) offer versions which are truly different, not just bigger. If someone wants MSAccess or Visio, they should be able to get it without getting it bundled with 12 other things they don’t give a shit about.
I needed to find one of those features which I used to know where the hell they were in the Control Panel. MS’s help mentions using the mouse once: the majority of the instructions are written assuming a touch screen. Your programs are still supposed to be both mouse-compatible and keyboard-compatible, remember it.
c) every time I hear people gush about the Cloud, I think of those ads for feminine hygiene products where apparently wearing the correct pad will not only keep you dry and unsmelly but make you lose several pounds, adjust your age to 20, add a soundtrack to your life and pastelize it. Software designers often sit atop a lot of huge servers, but they forget that not everybody does so. There have been incidents such as a backhoe accidentally leaving half of France internet-less for several days, people need to be able to work offline. Key word, need.
And even if it doesn’t break your computer it’s monitoring everything you do and has an in-built keylogger - that is NOT enhanced security! It’s inevitable some hacker is going to find a window into that and when that happens hackers won’t need to write viruses or engage in social engineering e-mails, they can just siphon what they need of your computer, everything your ever do on your computer there for the taking.
Know what the best security is for your computer? Turn off the internet. Yes, remarkably computers can work without the internet! Have a tablet for websurfing and social BS, keep your computer disconnected unless you have a specific reason for being on-line. If you aren’t on the internet you can’t catch viruses or get hacked over the internet.
Cortana is the execrable Clippy on steroids and with spyware as standard equipment.
Windows 7 does everything I need it to do. I avoid WiFi like the plague, the few devices I have that are WiFi capable have it turned off except for the rare occasions I specifically want to use it for a particular purpose, after which it is immediatley turned off. Among other things, I found this greatly extends battery life.
Microsoft doesn’t want you on a PC. For years, they talked about people not owning computer but renting/leasing them, or just having a dummy terminal and renting/leasing privileges on microsoft computers. This is just another way to achieve the same goal, where you don’t own the hardware, are utterly dependent on Microsoft for what you can and can’t do, and Microsoft can look over your shoulder, spy on you, and use your computer to make a profit for them.
On top of that, I don’t know if my system can even handle Windows 10 - I don’t have a touch screen. It’s an old computer. I simply can’t afford thousands of dollars, or even hundreds, to upgrade the hardware. So screw Windows 10 and Microsoft.
I can relate. Again, I nearly considered switching completely to Apple just for this. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll give up Windows 7 when you pry it out of my cold hands. Hard drive. Whichever.
This actually is fairly similar to the recent ban on the Russian track team. Sure, 10K is chump change for Microsoft, but for a massive corporation that has NEVER in its entire existence faced ANY consequences for ANY of the crap it’s pulled, simply facing any kind of penalty at all has to sting.
Blatantly ripping off Apple’s idea? Whatever. Endless versions for the sole purpose of squeezing customers for every penny they could? Meh. The bug-ridden steaming pile of crap that was Windows '95? La-dee-dah. Their big debut video game machine, the XBox, suffering total, permanent breakdowns so regularly (in some cases in the store) that “Red Ring of Death” became a freaking running gag? Pfft. And did anything, anything at all, come of that antitrust lawsuit? One of the ideas I heard was splitting the company in half. How many minutes did that last before Bill Gates tossed it into an incinerator with a maniacal laugh?
It’s taken an embarrassingly long time for a nation to wake up to the fact that allowing a powerful corporation infinite leeway to do whatever the hell it wants with absolute impunity would lead to abuses, but now it looks like it’s finally happened. Now, I don’t think for a second that Microsoft will ever suffer financially within my lifetime. But this court decision, at least, has delivered a bit of humility, and with it the hope that, somewhere down the line…not in a week, or a month, or a year, but someday…they’ll have no choice but to start giving a damn about their customers again.
There are plenty of reasons to reject Windows 10, but not having a touchscreen is not one of them. The touch screen stuff is only there if you have a touch screen, and stays out of the way if you don’t. It’s not Windows 8.
My main problem was how slow it ran after the first major update (which took entirely too long to actually install and was way too big), the fact that said update also kept forcing me to “upgrade” to a worse driver rather than the one that gave me OpenGL support, the fact that every update needed to restart, and the fact that I never really found a need to use the Store–the only feature that made it better.
When a Computer crash wiped all my user profiles from the hard drive, rather than copy back the Windows 7 one I had backed up, I just said “fuck it” and went back to Windows 7.
If I hadn’t read about it, I wouldn’t have even known there was a touch screen component.
Don’t expect immunity from this by running Apple’s OS … although I have to click install … it’s a regular nag-fest until I do.
My saving grace is that my hardware is too old to run the latest major update. Perhaps y’all need to get a newer WinTel box to run Windoze 10 … or just switch to Linux … there are some decent GUIs out there.
Microsoft has announced that Win 10 will receive an update in August. They also announced that Win 10 is it. There will be no Win 11. Win 10 will just be upgraded from this point on. It’s pretty clear that soon nothing, except the old crap, will run if you’re not running Win 10 in the future. Time is on their side in this war. The Cyborg from Redmond will win.
I’m running Windows 7 on parallels on a Mac laptop. I have to pay to upgrade parallels in order to run windows 10. Everything is working nicely now and I have no urge to shell out for this upgrade. I also really don’t like the annual license model for excel, word and PowerPoint which is the only reason I have Windows any more so I don’t want to upgrade windows and then be told my software won’t work anymore and now I need to pay yearly to keep it alive.
I know this is the future and there is no way around it but I’m going to delay as long as possible and hope a second option appears.
I hate the principle of Office 365 too, but fortunately there are also “pay once” versions of this software available. On the other hand, it’s incredibly obnoxious that Microsoft now refuses to sell any version of Office that can be installed on older OS’s like Vista.
I think what they want is to eventually force everything into the smartphone model where you have little control over your hardware and OS and can only install things from an app store.
They’ll never achieve this completely, because of the needs of business customers, especially large corporations, but that’s what they want for consumers.
They won’t want you to even own your equipment. Worse, it won’t be just your computers, phones, tablets, etc.
The so called “Internet of things” is aimed at you having to pay annual or even monthly fees for your refrigerator, your oven, your heating and cooling, hell maybe your toilet; in order to keep their software up to date and secure from hackers. None of those things need an internet connection, but they’ll try hard to convince you that it’s necessary.
I finallly installed Windows 10 on one of the computers in my house. Now it can’t get online. It finds the wifi, but no internet. I’ve tried about a dozen fixes I found on-line, but still nothing.
I was setting up for a night of astro-imaging, for which I use a laptop connected to the telescope with a custom cable, which in turn is connected using a USB to RS-232 converter.
I spent two hours setting everything up, started a multi-hour imagine sequence, and went into the house. I noticed that my images stopped appearing on the network after an hour, so I went out to check what was wrong - windows 10 was installing. Then I discovered that my cable driver wasn’t supported in Windows 10. I checked with the cable manufacturer’s web site for a new driver, and they said there wasn’t one and never would be, and I’d have to find a new cable.
I did manage to get it to work a couple days later with some hacks I found online, but that upgrade destroyed an entire night’s work. If that had happened while I was out at a dark site, it could have destroyed my entire trip.
I can’t imagine my experience is unique. There is a LOT of custom hardware and software out there that might not have survived a windows upgrade. Some of it could have been in fairly critical installations. Microsoft was incredibly reckless to just force updates/reboots to take place without permission. I’m sure they must have done a lot of damage to people in the process.
Wow! I know MS is a high-tech company, but I had no idea that they could build an upgrade that works just fine for people that actively request the upgrade, but fucks up every computer where the user didn’t want the damn thing.
I’m certain that it doesn’t fuck up every computer where the user doesn’t want it. No doubt there are many who have successfully upgraded, even those who didn’t want it. No doubt there are some who wanted it but then regretted it.
But it’s a risky upgrade that has fucked up some computers, and it’s wrong to force it on people with misleading prompts.
The people who didn’t want the upgrade, then had it forced on them, probably had very good reasons for avoiding the upgrade – custom software that would be incompatible with Windows 10, or a hardware setup with components that aren’t very common, for example. It doesn’t surprise me at all that those forced to upgrade seem to experience more problems with Windows 10.
It may also be that, of the people who didn’t want it, the ones who aren’t very technically savvy were the ones most likely to be tricked into upgrading to it anyway and the ones most ill equipped too deal with any glitches that occurred and therefore ended up talking about it online.
If someone didn’t agree to take the upgrade there’s no way they could have agreed to the terms; I don’t see how an arbitration-only clause would stick.