It's starting: businesswoman sues M$ for forced Windows 10 upgrade, wins $10,000

[Regolith]

http://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft/microsoft-draws-flak-for-pushing-windows-10-on-pc-users/

“I had never heard of Windows 10,” Goldstein said. “Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to update.”

When outreach to Microsoft’s customer support didn’t fix the issue, Goldstein took the software giant to court, seeking compensation for lost wages and the cost of a new computer.

She won. Last month, Microsoft dropped an appeal and Goldstein collected a $10,000 judgment from the company.

That didn't take long, and I imagine this won't be the last...

[Andiron]

Good for her.

I haven't been this angry about a bit of software I spent good money on in a long time.

[zahc]

Microsoft's recent shenanigans make me happy I have been Windows-free since 2006. I have almost relapsed a few times...Windows 7 was ttempting...but everything since then has reminded me why I just said no in the first place.

[RevDisk]

As an IT professional of way too many years, I agree with her suing and the judge ruling in her favor. Microsoft went to extreme lengths to intentionally deceive, trick, coerce or just flat out ignore the user in attempts to upgrade machines to an OS that is inferior in usability to Windows 7. I'm upgrading hundreds of machines to Windows 10. I use Windows 10 on my primary PC. It has a lot of great under the hood features. It's light years better than Windows 8 or 8.1. In terms of usability, it's dramatically inferior to XP or Windows 7. Microsoft is concentrating on app store, ads, cloud services, etc. Users want to be able to do their job. The two design theories, one by Microsoft and one by the user, are not quite polar opposite. But they're at least quite distant. Nothing in Windows 10 I've seen is designed for people to do work easier. Well, Edge is a very nice way to download Chrome or Mozilla. Half point there.

I absolutely hate and loath it. Yes, I DO know plenty about it, it's not "well, you just don't know what you are doing". I have to run it in enterprise environments. I'll never run it on my home network. It's a complete cast iron nightmare to get everything running appropriately. It does NOT like network deployments of anti-virus, apparently. I will run a MAC in my house before I touch Windows 10. Linux has gone full retard lately with systemd so the Mac option sadly not as bad of an option as you'd think. It's bad, but it might be the least bad of the current lot.

All of my coworkers that have moved to Windows 10 are aggravated and noticeably more hostile. Myself included. I don't blame a single one of them.

[RoadKingLarry]

[captain obvious]

My take is that MS wants the "experience" to be totally under their control. It looks like they are driving to a point where all you have resident on your physical device is enough software to connect to the web and they take it from there.
Kind of like getting back to the old "dumb terminal" world only with more bling (and spam).

[/captain obvious]

[RevDisk]

[captain obvious]

My take is that MS wants the "experience" to be totally under their control. It looks like they are driving to a point where all you have resident on your physical device is enough software to connect to the web and they take it from there.
Kind of like getting back to the old "dumb terminal" world only with more bling (and spam).

[/captain obvious]

Na, that already exists. Chromebooks. They're selling, but not in super high numbers.

I do agree Microsoft wants to dabble in the "walled garden" or "end to end consumer experience", but that's Mac's thing. There's a very good reason why Macs are used in virtually no business with more than 20 employees, other than graphic designs and formerly film.

[lee n. field]

Na, that already exists. Chromebooks. They're selling, but not in super high numbers.

I do agree Microsoft wants to dabble in the "walled garden" or "end to end consumer experience", but that's Mac's thing. There's a very good reason why Macs are used in virtually no business with more than 20 employees, other than graphic designs and formerly film.

Schools love Chromebooks.   They're cheap, and they're totally under control.

[41magsnub]

Schools love Chromebooks.   They're cheap, and they're totally under control.

Yep, we're rolled out a couple thousand of them for our school clients this summer.

[Boomhauer]

Somebody should be shot for the upgrade trickery. I dodged it but only because I heard about it.

[RevDisk]

Schools love Chromebooks.   They're cheap, and they're totally under control.

Ayep. Though, the school I'm most proud of, Penn Manor, is using Lenovo 11e's to students. Running Linux. And the students have root. They have a student help desk. Students write webapps, blogs, etc. No spyware.

http://technology.pennmanor.net/1to1devices/#/
http://technology.pennmanor.net/open-source-in-school/

Chromebooks are popular because they're cheap, easily locked down to levels that'd make the Stasi weep in joy and you can wipe them to baseline more easily than most people can install Chrome in a normal OS. On the other hand, the functionality is very limited. That'll change when Android apps are allowed to run on them. Your Chromebook comes with a 5 year life (for updates, and you don't use an OS with that is unsupported). If you're a school and you toss them every year, or every other year, no biggie. The argument is they're cheap, and nearly disposable. But 5 years is still a very short lifespan for a machine.

The other feedback I've gotten from school districts is that processors are a problem. Folks want cheap Chromebooks with pretty screens. Corners have to be cut, and the processor speed is a real problem. They've seen iterations where newer laptops run slower than the previous year. Easily fixed, spend $300 instead of $150. But for that price, you can get a Lenovo 11e and get an actual laptop.

[lee n. field]

But 5 years is still a very short lifespan for a machine.

School I support still has the 512M Celeron clones we sold them for their first labs, back in '03-'05, still in classrooms.  Almost unusable.

They've seen iterations where newer laptops run slower than the previous year.

Their last teacher rollout, they got Lenovo laptops that are dog slow for their specs.  I'd love to get my hands on a free one, to try to figure out where the bottleneck is.

Nope, they haven't bought what I quoted them for a while.  The superintendant will go out and buy whatever he finds cheap somewhere.

[230RN]

In terms of usability, it's dramatically inferior to XP or Windows 7. Microsoft is concentrating on app store, ads, cloud services, etc. Users want to be able to do their job.

I'm glad I got wind of the Win10 problems before I went and got the "free upgrade."

I'm still running XP on one machine for the usability.  Win7 has some nice additional features, but for slickness of my usual tasks, I use XP.  Sorry about that, MS.

I got a nice little USB A-B switch to conveniently throw the printer, keyboard, and mouse from one machine to the other.

Somehow I worked some magic such that I blocked automatic upgrades to Win10.

Happy, happy, happy me.

Terry

[41magsnub]

School I support still has the 512M Celeron clones we sold them for their first labs, back in '03-'05, still in classrooms.  Almost unusable.

Their last teacher rollout, they got Lenovo laptops that are dog slow for their specs.  I'd love to get my hands on a free one, to try to figure out where the bottleneck is.

Nope, they haven't bought what I quoted them for a while.  The superintendant will go out and buy whatever he finds cheap somewhere.

We've been fighting that.  It is super tempting for our school clients to get the cheap stuff.  It doesn't work out for them frequently, for example we had a bunch of Lenovo laptops with weak keyboards where they started losing keys after a few months of use.  It took months of arguing to get them to make it right since individual warranty returns was so labor intensive.  They credited the customer 50% of the purchase cost to get something else.

[lee n. field]

We've been fighting that.  It is super tempting for our school clients to get the cheap stuff.  It doesn't work out for them frequently, for example we had a bunch of Lenovo laptops with weak keyboards where they started losing keys after a few months of use.  It took months of arguing to get them to make it right since individual warranty returns was so labor intensive.  They credited the customer 50% of the purchase cost to get something else.

Back 2010 or so, the guy who was HS principal for one year before moving on, bought a lab cart full of Dell laptops from a refurbisher in Canada.  Dell Vostro home user machines.   They were awful.  I was buying keyboards 10 and 15 at a time.  Hard disks would take 45 minutes to swap out, because you'd have to take the thing apart, turn the motherboard over, to get to them.  Every single time I'd open one, a  plastic screw down would break off.

<shudder>.

[Phantom Warrior]

I recently discovered Never 10 after having enough customers come in pissed about the Windows 10 upgrade.  It's a little program that blocks the upgrade with one click of your mouse.  It disables the update so you don't have to keep it constantly running.  If you decide you want Windows 10 later you can always change your mind and reenable it.

https://www.grc.com/never10.htm

[KD5NRH]

My take is that MS wants the "experience" to be totally under their control. It looks like they are driving to a point where all you have resident on your physical device is enough software to connect to the web and they take it from there.

And then some idiot with a backhoe hits a fiber and all CenturyLink customers in TX are offline from 0900-1730 on a weekday.

Yeah, there were some rude awakenings to how bad an idea it is to have critical apps in the "cloud" Thursday.

[HeroHog]

And then some idiot with a backhoe hits a fiber and all CenturyLink customers in TX are offline from 0900-1730 on a weekday.

Yeah, there were some rude awakenings to how bad an idea it is to have critical apps in the "cloud" Thursday.

Nothing like having half of Arkansas's internet taken out by a chicken farmer digging a pit to bury a ton of heat killed chickens. The farmer breaks the fiber, KNOWS he broke it, and goes ahead and fills the pit with the rotting chickens anyway before the cable people arrive! When they DO get there, the Hazmat suits come out, the EPA gets involved and fun ensues in general for all affected...