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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

If this were like any other Windows OS upgrade in the past, I'd be OK with this. But... it's not. It adds a lot of tracking, reporting, and some (currently innocuous) uncontrollable communication back to Microsoft. I guess it really is time to do the cost/benefit analysis of a single company collecting all of this information from my gaming rig.

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Honestly regardless of whether Windows 10 is good or not I can't stand MS pushing this update down my throat.

I have a Windows 7 computer that I use mainly for gaming and having those notifications pop up randomly is infuriating, it behaves like some crappy adware that comes bundled with IE toolbars.

No option to turn it off either, you have to manually uninstall a bunch of updates if you want to get rid of it. And I almost believed the "but MS has changed" crowd. I really hope Valve manages to bring gaming on linux so that I never have to bother with this crappy OS anymore.

> I really hope Valve manages to bring gaming on linux

Not sure which games you play, but most of my favorites turned out to be available on Steam for Linux. I made the switch after W10's release and have hardly regretted it.

Any time I see an article claiming Microsoft's app store and XBox will wipe out Valve, I remind myself that it's not Microsoft's direct counters to Valve, it's Microsoft's sheer size that will create the openings Valve needs.

The OS group is undoing all the progress the XBox group has won.

Maybe...Elite: Dangerous, Star Citizen, or anything made by Blizzard? It's disingenuous to act like all you need is Steam.

Anything made by Blizzard works in Wine just fine. Switched to Linux only years ago. I remember I was already playing WoW WotLK in Ubuntu with Wine.

All I need is steam. It's not disingenuous to claim that, because its true :)

What aggravates is that I uninstalled the update (and selected "ignore this update") which should have gotten rid of these prompts... and the next Windows update promptly re-installed it.

It was a stark reminder me how little control I have over my personal computers right now.

You have to turn off automatic updates, uninstall the update, refresh updates, tell it to hide the specific update so that it won't install. I believe at that point you can turn automatic updates back on.

That's the process I did to get rid of the nagging on three Win7 machines.

MSFT wiped the "hide" mark already once:

http://au.pcmag.com/windows-10/39165/news/oops-update-glitch...

"Mistake my rear end!!! Microsoft got caught re-re-releasing KB3035583 and other related updates and now they're trying to walk back their outrageous and unethical behavior."

The fact that you have to do this will hopefully spark a class-action lawsuit against this incredulous behavior.

On what charge? There is no law against making a bad product in general, and I do not see an anti-trust angle to apply here.

Not a lawyer so don't know, but it seems there is some rather underhanded approach to what they are doing here, and class actions seem to pop up for much less.

Sorry, nope. MS is fully up to date[1] on corporate best practices for circumventing class action suits and generally opting out of having to participate in the same legal system that governs individuals[2].

Hope you humans enjoyed your brief stint as the dominant organism on Earth! Thanks for playing!

[1]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Useterms/Retail/Windows/10/U...

[2]: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/business/dealbook/arbitrat...

I feel a bit left out. I am using windows7 (preinstalled on laptop) and not once have I been notified about Windows 10.

None of "get your free copy sign up now", none of the "do you want to upgrade".

Do you regularly install windows updates? Are you in a company-domain?

Make sure you have the required ~16GB of free disk space that it requires temporarily for the download.

Definitely check compatibility for games on Steam. The day I realized I could install the latest Civilization on Linux was the day I stopped dual-booting on my desktop.

They are shoving it down our collective throats because there is a very large cohort of completely oblivious users who would otherwise never consume the update. I can appreciate their desire to EoL Windows 7 and avoid another Windows XP, wherein they have to support an operating system for 15 years. Even RHEL only offers 10 years on their extended support.

Same reason Chrome updates automatically in the background without your consent. It's just less invasive, because it's only a browser.

You also lose Windows Media *Center, which some of us paid extra for so we could easily connect our Xbox 360 to our Windows PC without extra steps or ongoing fees.

You have a typo: Media Center, not Player.

Quite right. I meant Center. I was still drinking my coffee.

While I do lament the loss of Media Center (it has some functions that while not commonly used, are still useful to some people) I've had luck with Plex for media stored on the local network to X360/Chromecast/etc. It works a lot better than the 360's alleged integration with WMC for certain.

This is without any ongoing fees but since it's a third party application, it does require the extra step of installing it. I never subscribed to their Plex Pass paid service but after installing the free Plex server and pointing it at my media directories on my desktop and NAS, it's worked great. The ability to transcode was particularly useful because the 360 wouldn't play some formats and it was easier to install Plex than to transcode them all.

Either way, this isn't meant to dismiss your legit complaint. Just hoping my experiences can be of use to you or others in the same situation. If you used WMC to handle OTA television viewing and recording, you may be better served by Kodi or some other application.

Unfortunately, I switched to an Xbox One and, last I checked, Plex required a rather high yearly fee to work with it. I think it was the Plex Pass you mentioned which came with a ton of features I didn't care about and would not use. All I wanted to do was stream from my PC to my Xbox One and I'd have paid a reasonable one time fee for a piece of software to do that. But not a high yearly fee for a package of services I have no need of. Not sure if it's changed since I looked.

Plex does not have DVR. I only use an antenna, so WMC is my only DVR. I paid extra to have a couple of computers be able to stream TV as well as the 360. Now I'm facing not having any of it work.

I guess I'll try MythTV after I can't run 8.1 pro.

I reverted back to Windows 7 for pretty much exactly the same reasons as you describe. Not to mention that my speakers also stopped working!

How is that any different from Apple and Google OSes?

Does it have to be different from Apple and Google's to be worth complaining about? The real competition here for a lot of users is against older versions of MS's own OSs.

No, but I see lots of complaints as if Microsoft was the first into this game.

Understandable, but for a lot of people (me at least) a large part of why we use Windows on one machine or another is because of what it offers over those other OSes.

I personally tend to use Windows because I can run it on just about any brand or model of x86 PC, it supports pretty much every component or peripheral I own, and it will run software not available for Linux.

So yeah, when something you make heavy use of adopts policies that you don't like, it's pretty common to discuss and criticize them. If nothing else, Microsoft (or any other company) would be wise to consider these complaints from users because they can easily impact their bottom line over time.

Whether you want to classify your thoughts as an appeal to popularity, or maybe as "moral equivalence", or some other sort of logical fallacy, it's still a logical fallacy. For one, it doesn't really matter who was first, it doesn't absolve Microsoft of anything. Morality or the right to privacy should not be relative concepts.

But related to your question - OS X does not leak data and comparing Windows with iOS or Android is comparing apples and oranges, as Windows is usually the desktop OS that has access to your company's VPN, your work and everything of importance, whereas a smartphone has at most access to your contacts, your calendar and your email. In other words sensitive, but not critical.

Configure telemetry and other settings in your organization https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt577208%28v=vs....

>OS X does not leak data

How to Stop Apple From Snooping on Your OS X Yosemite Searches http://www.wired.com/2014/10/how-to-fix-os-x-yosemite-search...

FYI: OS X Yosemite's Spotlight tells Apple EVERYTHING you're looking for http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/20/apple_spotlight_priv...

> comparing Windows with iOS or Android is comparing apples and oranges

This used to be true, a few years ago, but it isn't now.

Windows 10 is a mobile operating system that also runs on mobile phones. It has notifications and Cortana (from Windows Phone) and it integrates with online cloud storage (OneDrive). It's intended to be continuously updated and work with apps acrosss multiple platforms, including iOS and Android.

In sum, this is not your granddad's Windows....

It's different from earlier Windows and Linux. Android and IOS were always like this, and thus people use them accordingly.

For me, the difference lies in that if I tell OSX "No", they respect that choice. For Windows 10, if I tell it "No", it interprets it as "It's OK for me to still send some things".

As for ChromeOS, you are aware of what you're getting into from the beginning. In contrast, it wasn't always this way with Windows.

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