Win X Unwanted Upgrade

[W3WN]

Anyone run into this? I'd heard rumors, but this was the first time I actually heard it first-hand.

One of the members of the WASH Club was complaining to me about her laptop, yesterday at the annual club picnic. Her story is, she'd "recently" (within the last year, if memory serves) bought a new laptop, with Win 8 on it. Suddenly within the last week or so (she wasn't specific on when), the laptop automatically uploaded and installed Win 10 on it.

She is not happy. She doesn't like Win 10, she didn't want Win 10, and she wants Win 8 back.

I suspect that her grandson (who set the machine up for her) probably set it for automatic updates. She insists she didn't "reserve" or otherwise request Win 10, so that's the only reason I can think of for Win 10 to self-install. (And the machine most likely came with Win 8 Home, not Win 8 Pro)

I don't know yet if her grandson can roll it back. Frankly, I don't want to ask... I don't want to get sucked into this one.

Any ideas? (Besides nuking from orbit and reinstalling the original OS from scratch, IF she has the original OEM disks, which for some reason, I doubt)

[KG4CGC]

It won't upgrade unless you click on the proper icon. She either accidentally clicked or some such user error somewhere.

[KJ3N]

It won't upgrade unless you click on the proper icon. She either accidentally clicked or some such user error somewhere.

Yep, this. Someone did something. It doesn't just install itself.

There is a rollback option. http://www.thewindowsclub.com/rollback-from-windows-10

[W3WN]

Well gentlemen, as they say in IT... and I should know, since I'm one of they... know your users. Suffice to say, I know this user QUITE well.

I'm SURE that this didn't happen the way it was described... but I can only tell you what I was told.

Jim: If and when her nephew contacts me for help on her machine (which has happened in the past), I'll steer him to that link. Other than that, I'm not stepping into this frying pan.

[KJ3N]

I'm SURE that this didn't happen the way it was described... but I can only tell you what I was told.

And users NEVER lie, do they?

[K4PIH]

Ubuntu and Mint in the shack, no problems.

[wa6mhz]

MY Win 8.1 is working fine on 3 Machines and they are critical to radio operation. I don't wanna mess with them. I have heard the HORROR stories of how things that used to work no longer did once WIN 10 was on board!

[WØTKX]

YMMV. It worked really well for me on the ham shack PC, and I run a Flex 3000 SDR radio. Granted, I was running Win7 Pro, and got the WinX (I like that nickname) Pro on that PC. I did have some latency issues from the upgrade, but figured those out pretty quickly. What really blew my mind is all the hardware and eight Virtual Cable audio pairs fired up right away. I run 3 soundcards and 8 USB ports as well. Granted, I'm a Windows geek from way back, and know what to watch for. Easily avoided Windows Update and WinX "reservation" default settings can "force" the upgrade.

Wife is still running Win 8.1 on her convertible touchscreen laptop. Reserved, but no "forced" upgrade. Her office PC is running WinX Home, which she prefers to Win7 Home.

It's too bad you have to watch it and turn off a bunch of stuff. Microsoft screwed the pooch on the defaults, but the rollback works.

[KG4CGC]

WinX came loaded on the new laptop with no bloatware. So far I like it. Running CS2 better than I've ever seen it run.



http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c79/bebop5/Aliens%20Guy/rods-reels_zpsbclenwd0.png

[WØTKX]

Hrrrrrrm. It's only working well for Liberal Loons?

CONSPIRACY! :evil:

[KJ3N]

Hrrrrrrm. It's only working well for Liberal Loons?

CONSPIRACY! :evil:

https://andthegeekshall.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/ct-sad-cat.jpg

[W3WN]

Talk about timely...

Woody Leonhard has a column on today's Infoworld page detailing how this is happening... an dhow you can remove WinX it Micro$oft has automatically downloaded it to your machine.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2983777/microsoft-windows/how-to-clean-the-windows-10-crapware-off-your-windows-7-or-81-pc.html

[PA5COR]

^ Thanks, just kicked the crap off the P.C.

[K0RGR]

It's an interesting marketing ploy. Right now, the upgrade is free. In the future, who knows?

Downloading 6 GB of stuff to my computer would not be a welcomed event, though I did that on two of mine when I upgraded to Win X.

So far, it has some quirks, but I think it's much better than 8.1, though I like 7 a lot. I agree with some of the paranoia about what you are letting MS do to your machine. But I also trust Google. Just not very far in either case.

[WØTKX]

Interesting. I turned off a bunch of stuff after the "Reservation" and before the upgrade.
From Win7 pro to WinX pro, the hidden directory is 4GB, not 6.

[NA4BH]

I like it, works good here.

[VE7DCW]

I still have the Windows 10 icon staring at me in the task bar wanting me to take up the MS offer to get it for free.I have Windows 7 Ultimate on the netbook currently,working fine and if it's not broke don't fix it........time to see how long I can get away with it. :yes:

[NQ6U]

Speaking as a long-time Mac/Linux user, this says it all:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFM105UuJw

[WØTKX]

Never understood the demonizing of OS's. OS/2 was considered to be an IBM conspiracy.

I like OS/2. It worked really well for me. Beos was pretty cool too. :dunno:

[XE1/N5AL]

I think that Microsoft operatives are sneaking into our houses while we sleep, to power-up our computers and click on that Windows 10 upgrade icon.

[kb2vxa]

I KNOW that Micro$haft operatives are sneaking into Windblows 7 and 8.1 computers by way of upgrades and spying on our every move. W10 or more appropriately WinX is loaded with spyware but there are ways to cripple it, trouble is staying one step ahead of the devil. http://www.ghacks.net/2015/08/14/comparison-of-windows-10-privacy-tools/ If you want security and these days you need it against MicroSatan, dump their shitware and go with Linux.

"I still have the Windows 10 icon staring at me in the task bar wanting me to take up the MS offer to get it for free."
Well then here's how to get rid of it: https://techjourney.net/disable-remove-get-windows-10-upgrade-reservation-notification-system-tray-icon/ There are plenty more useful tools Googling "remove windows spy" comes up with like this one http://thehackernews.com/2015/08/windows-spying-on-you.html but you can't stop here or MicroSatan will keep on burning you with his minions working hard in the measures vs. countermeasures game. Oh, here's a little batch file that will save you the trouble of typing all that crap in line by line.

[W3WN]

Never understood the demonizing of OS's. OS/2 was considered to be an IBM conspiracy.

I like OS/2. It worked really well for me. Beos was pretty cool too. :dunno:
Same basic reason that Micro$oft marketing demonized Netware. It wasn't their product, and it was market share that they didn't have.

The irony of OS/2 was, of course, that it came from a joint IBM/M$ project to market a 16 bit operating system. When (for a long variety of reasons I won't bore anyone with) IBM & M$ decided to end their joint venture, IBM kept the name; M$ renamed their product as Windows NT.

So M$ marketing was demonizing the inbred sibling, so to speak, of their own OS.

[WØTKX]

Yessir, that it was. Netware was damn good and reliable, but TCP/IP and routing took hold... for good reason, IMHO.

[W3WN]

Yessir, that it was. Netware was damn good and reliable, but TCP/IP and routing took hold... for good reason, IMHO.
Oh, Novell made some mistakes. One of the big ones was not adapting TCP/IP in addition to their native IPX protocols fast enough, for one. But they did.

I can still remember, during the year I worked as an intern at USX in the corporate IT department, sitting at a Micro$oft presentation on Windows NT Server, hearing about all of the things that M$'s server could do that Novell's couldn't... and whispering to the department head at the time (so help me, William W. Wise... man drank coffee around the clock, even at 4 PM on a sweltering summer afternoon... ) "but we're doing that right now on the test Netware 3 server we're running down in the office", only to be told "shush". And it was no coincidence that the presentation was being made primarily to non-technical department managers; officially, none of us IT folk were supposed to be there.

Oh, and years later, when I worked at the engineering firm that got bought and and swallowed up by US Filter, being told by the USF Corporate VP for IT that we now reported to, that it was impossible... impossible!... to route IP traffic across a Netware network. Couldn't be done. Nope, not at all, no sir. Only thing was... I was doing it. (This was also the man who couldn't figure out how I got over 300 users connected, each getting their machine's IP addresses from DHCP. There were only 255 possible IP addresses, after all! All it took was a simple change to the subnet mask, to double the available IP addresses... which he insisted wouldn't work, only it did)

That all said... Netware's days as the king of the hill were doomed, once M$ decided to take over the server market. But Novell didn't have to help kill it by blundering about (buying WordPerfect, buying Digital Research, buying UNIX from AT&T, selling all of those later for a huge financial hit... amongst others); it could have survived with a smaller market share. But that's another story for another time.

[WØTKX]

Yup, I remember that well. I was rolling my eyes because *nix was already doing a good job for our customers. MS and Novell were playing catch up. I didn't mess with Novell's implementation of TCP/IP until it had become a legacy thing. But it did work pretty well by then.

[W3WN]

Yeah.

As I recall, there were actually two flavors of IPX in addition to TCP/IP available in Netware 4. I had my network servers set up to communicate on three... call them network addresses... in Netware; one for each IPX, one for TCP/IP. Each server had a routing table to move data across all three virtual networks (what they effectively, even if not technically, were). Each production server had at least one LAN card which handled the appropriate users (by department/floor) for the box... ie, admin & accounting were on the accounting server, the CAD folks were on the CAD servers (2 later consolidated to 1), etc. Each server also had a separate LAN card connecting to a 10 Base T hub (no, not switch; yes, this goes back quite a ways) that served as the backbone. Each server in this configuration had it's own DHCP service running, to manage IP for each of it's own LAN segment(s). And each production server had it's own Lotus cc:Mail "post office" to handle email -- with an OS/2 box acting as the "post office hub" to route email between each server and the wide, wide world of sports.

Sounds complicated when it's all typed out like that, but really, it was anything but.

Then the company got bought.

I was ordered to remove all of the users... each wiring closet had a Synoptics hub that was connected to the appropriate server in the server room... from the individual servers and put them all on the backbone. Almost 350, so of course, there's a little issue with IP addresses; easily solved by changing the subnet mask (from 255.255.255.0 to 255.255.254.0) in DHCP, which I was told was impossible and wouldn't work. (Also let me eliminate all but one of the DHCP services running, reduced it to one server)

I was given an NT server to run Exchange 4.0 and our users were converted to Outlook 97. We were told that it was impossible to migrate email from cc:Mail to Outlook. I found a utility to do just that, but not before a few of our execs were told to just forward the messages they wanted from one system to the other, which really bogged things down.

Now, a 10 Base T hub was just fine when it was the server backbone... and I put in many a request to upgrade it to a 100 Base T switch, but kept getting shot down since it wasn't "necessary" (this was the 90's, after all, and the CFO was a cheap bastard... nice guy otherwise, but he really hated to spend a penny). When all the users got put directly on the backbone... well, you can imagine. I got a 3COM 100 Base T switch in there within a week.

I was told to downgrade our server AV product from InocuLAN (later CA InoculateIT, and it's gone through some other name changes since, but it's still around) to McAfee. I refused... and almost got fired, but the CFO told that VP that it wasn't my decision, but his, and he wasn't spending the money to replace a perfectly good software app that he'd just paid a LOT of money for. (That's also why we were "given" the NT server with Exchange, the CFO refused to pay for it. I heard rumors later that this was also why he was "encouraged" to find other employment - and did. ) For the rest of my time at the company (around 2-3 years of so, every time there was a panic about a new virus floating around... the VP would call me and demand I change over to McAfee immediately to counter the threat, and I'd tell him that I'd already uploaded the latest InocuLAN update/patch & rolled it out to our users (and yes, I'd tell him when I did so, but somehow, no, he never got the memo. Imagine that. )

All in all, though, I kept that Netware network running. For my hard work, I found out, I got pigeon-holed as the "Netware guy" who couldn't handle anything else... even though I'd also been managing an OS/2 server and the NT server without a problem. So when layoffs were planned, guess who the corporate IT VP put on the top of the list? (I wasn't supposed to find out, but I got tipped off). And, of course, after I was "eliminated", and the IT VP couldn't figure out anything I did, especially since he never came down to my server room and looked at anything or any of my documentation (he didn't have to, after all, it was Netware, not NT!)... or so I was told... well, I heard that the conversion to NT servers didn't go well. Not that I could do a thing about it at that point in time.

So it goes.

[WØTKX]

Yea, my focus was on CAD servers/workstations.
Apollo and 10-Net Token ring was a big deal.

Legacy stuff is legacy.