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> people here commenting very strongly in favour of Microsoft, which I find very surprising. Perhaps people from MS trying to do damage control

I realize you didn't mean to, but this triggered a whole off-topic discussion about imaginary astroturfing, vote-brigading, and shilling.

When we see evidence of these behaviors we crack down on them hard. But people are far too ready (by at least an order of magnitude, probably two) to impute this behavior to others merely because they have an opposing opinion. That's not evidence, and the discussion should never go there on that (non-)basis.

All: if you suspect astroturfing in HN threads, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate, and please don't go on about it in the threads unless there's real evidence. An opposing opinion is not evidence!

I had this exact same issue with my work machine and my at home workstation. Wifi adapter completely broken, I tried to revert back to Windows 8 on my work machine and it gets stuck on a black screen for over 24 hours. I tried to power down to restart it but no luck. Somehow everything got corrupted. Had to completely reformat the drive and install the operating system all over again, which it then proceeded to upgrade straight to Windows 10 again. I lost months of work but was able to recover from a backup I had a week prior to the incident. Absolutely disgusting business practice by Microsoft. The only times where a Windows 10 installation has worked well for me is when it's a brand new machine with little to no extra content on top of the existing OS. If you've used Windows 7 or 8 for over a year and accumulated a fair amount of apps, files, content, I can almost guarantee you're going to run into something breaking after the update.

Same scenario three weeks ago trying to help out my brother on his brand new Asus that came with Win 10. The wireless hardware just disappeared from the control panel so the option to update the driver wasn't available. I was about to walk him through a complete OS re-install with the option to keep his files until he decided that a wired connection was OK. At the time there was almost no available recent support articles on this issue, but I'm starting to think a Win update caused this after seeing others with the same problem. And here he was going to blame it on his kids...

> The wireless hardware just disappeared from the control panel

I installed a fresh Win10 for a family member, and the complete mess of absent/hidden/redesigned/half-duplicated control panel stuff was my first hint that I'd want to stay on Windows-7.

Same issue here. I actually upgraded to Win 10 from Win 7 about 3 months ago. Then 3 weeks back, an automatic update, and lost both Wifi and Wired connectivity. - No use updating drivers (they are not available for Win 10). -Cannot go back to Win 7 from System Update (since that option available only for a month). -Since Win7 is pre-installed, cannot even download a CSO image file with my product key!

I am still lost about what to do. Thankfully, after a complete restore to first Win10, I have wired connectivity back.

> Perhaps people from MS trying to do damage control?

While I appreciate the rest of your comment, I personally find comment like these are obnoxious. I sincerely doubt that vote and comment brigading are anywhere near as prevalent as reddit and this community seem to so routinely imply. Perhaps I'm the naive one, but it is tiresome to so regularly see comments (especially those close to one's own personal beliefs) consistently labeled indicators of a social media PR campaign because someone just can't believe they might be genuine.

Or maybe I should get my head out of the sand, I do not know.

Anyone who believes that it's okay to force unwanted updates onto someone's computer without unexpectedly and without their consent is a bit obnoxious.

I don't think it's OK. Is that what you wanted?

I'm not going to go into detail right now, but believe me it happens from Microsoft more than any other company I've seen.

That's just it though - I don't believe you.

For what it's worth I believe you are being wildly naive. Have a nice day.

It isn't worth much, but - believe it or not - it's not totally worthless either. Note my wording though: I believe it does happen at times, I doubt it happens with the frequency claimed on HN and reddit. Hearing more first-hand accounts of it occurring is required for me to move substantially on my opinion. As is, it's primarily speculation and people asking others to "trust them, it happens."

That said, I could do without the insincere well wishes.

First hand accounts? As in someone saying "yes, I do this"?

Well I was more thinking along the lines of "yeah, I personally saw this done for my product/company." So, second-hand I guess. But first-hand experience of the second-hand account, if that makes sense. At any rate, the point is this: I'm not going to take it on faith, and I won't naturally assume the most sinister thing is occurring.

Does this count? http://www.businessinsider.com/russian-internet-trolls-are-t...

>I believe it does happen at times

Rather like a forced OS upgrade - how many times is too often?

I apologize for the "Have a nice day." I meant it ironically rather than insincerely, it can be difficult to convey tone on the Internet.

To provide context: I was telling people for years before Snowden that "they" were recording everything. Of course, I was dismissed as a wearer of the tin-foil hat, yes? I'm afraid I find naivete a bit frustrating. No excuse for rudeness though! Sorry about that! :-)

Warm regards, and sincere wishes of kindness to you and yours.

I'm going to make a few statements here to address the parent and children; but let me put the normal disclaimers here: I ONLY can speak for myself, I do not speak for MS or any of my coworkers.

Simply put, the sort of behavior implied (vote brigading) doesn't mesh with my understanding of how I or any of my coworker/HN reader peers tend to behave. I could be totally off the mark with this but it just doesn't mesh with the culture I've been exposed to.

More relevantly however, and more in line with how I typically approach HN threads regardless of topic, let me try and pose a more "occams razor" explanation:

MS has been gaining a lot of positive press lately. The tech community WANTS to see our biggest entities succeed and "do good". We hate seeing suggestions that a "new convert" to the good side might have changed face again. Realizing that a company can do both good and "evil" simultaneously is a degree of mental dissonance I don't often see handled "cleanly" so to say.

Long and the short; I am not happy with the forced upgrades. I am still using 7, and would be rather irked if they broke everything for the sake of forcing through content I do not want. However, I do tend to attribute much more naïve explanations for the patterns we're seeing, over some sort of PR conspiracy. There was a wonderful quote a while back, "we're not organized enough to be that evil" :) I don't mean to be any sort of MS apologist in this, my comment is entirely directed at the discussion regarding some degree of astroturfing, if I got asked about my opinions on the updates, well, that's a whole can of worms on its own and the remaining comments in the thread seem to speak to the resounding sentiment in that respect.

Out of curiosity, are you an engineer there? If so I'm wondering how close you are and how much visibility you have into the marketing and PR side of things over there.

This strikes me as the kind of thing that engineers might be kept in the dark about, but some PR agency somewhere may have outsourced something like this and done so in a way as to provide plausible deniability. A quick googling shows this wouldn't be the first time MS has resorted to astroturfing [1].

So while I don't doubt the sincerity of how you or any of your immediate coworkers/HN reader peers tend to behave, I think the facts speak a bit more clearly to the possibility of other parts of the MS organism being willing to do this sort of thing.

[1] https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

I am, yes. My visibility has shifted depending on different orgs I've been in (I've been in orgs where I'm entirely disconnected from the PR side of things, and in others where I get regular mails from the marketing teams); I read some of the links on the search you provided but they seem to denote "what I'd expect", a worst case where a vendor goes too far in accomplishing a PR objective, and while it's plausible that this is ongoing (as you say, I CERTAINLY don't know what totally distinct marketing teams on contract are doing) I'd note one thing: That in the well documented occurrences in the past, it's typically been the more "standard" sort of native advertising dark patterns that are becoming prevalent. I don't say this to excuse it in the least; but to say that I tend to see "patterns" even in the more questionable actions of a given entity, and even when I looked more deeply in said googling I didn't find many concrete occurrences of that sort of truly grassroots astroturfing. Enough accusations to raise an eyebrow for sure; but I'd point out a few things on that as well: in some of the well documented cases, MS has come forward and accepted accountability for the occurrence. While this could absolutely be a post-factum face saving, the cost/benefit of enacting those sorts of campaigns seems misaligned, at least to my eyes, that I'd be hard pressed to think of any of the Marketing/PR people I've met taking that sort of risk.

Again, there could certainly be degrees of separation, and as you accurately state I can't in any way speak on that. My main goal was just to speak to the best intentions and actions of the peers I've had the opportunity and privilege to work with.

> I am still using 7,

Was in a similar boat as you, until a new build more or less forced me to use 10 (motherboard only had USB 3. yes, you can slipstream drivers into a 7 installer - but when I tried this, the machine kept bluescreening to high heck). After a few months, I'm perfectly fine with it.

Don't get me wrong, there are problems - but there have always been problems. The two competing but not quite feature matching control panels for example. I also turned notifications completely off, as they were all for trivial BS (in my case).

But overall, I am now just as happy as I was on 7.

It is just shocking to see people complaining of data loss, and other extreme inconveniences caused by this update, but then on the other hand people going so far as to flag this thread (see comments below), despite this having been experienced by thousands of people. Being skeptical makes sense, but flagging the thread? I don't see that kind of polar opposite reaction often on HN.

It can be relatively economic to pay people to post favourable comments if they already enjoy doing it anyway. I suspect that it happens more often than you think, and often takes the form of just paying people to hold biased opinions. It is not hard to imagine that if someone was holding onto a large amount of Microsoft stock, it would be easy to maintain cognitive dissonance.

> everyone disagreeing with me is a shill

Well you could just go see post history and call out the obvious one, letting downvotes take care of the rest.

Anyway I had win 10 preinstalled on a laptop and since the last patch craze my wifi stopped working reliably.

I think MS managed to bork something there independently from the os upgrade, but even more interestingly all other computers around here, same make same model, upgraded just fine, so I'd give some credit to the other voices until the actual technical issue is pinned down. At least for the driver issues, the sneaky os update is maddness.

I would normally agree, but Microsoft have a very well known pattern of astroturfing. Hell, they invented practically invented the Internet version in 2001.

I'd like to think that under Satya Nadella's reign they would have stopped, but they are still doing dodgy shit like forced upgrades to Windows 10.

To say that this is an utter PR nightmare is a complete understatement. If, as some comments indicate, they have bricked hardware then I think a class action lawsuit wouldn't be out of the question!

Whoever made the decision to auto upgrade literally hundreds of millions of computers should be fired. I believe that before the auto upgrade Microsoft said there were 110 million installs of Windows 10, but that was still only roughly 10% of total computers. There were still something like 40% of computers running Windows 7. Even if only 1% of computers that get upgraded automatically get bricked due to incompatible drivers, or whatever then that's still well over a million computers Microsoft have borked due to this stupidity.

Look, I can accept automatic upgrades for an existing operating system on consumer grade workstations. But I cannot understand or accept that automatically upgrading to a new major release is a responsible business decision. Microsoft are getting this in the neck, and rightly so. This alone is a good reason for me to recommend to my friends and family that they only buy a Mac, and if they can't that I work out if it's worthwhile installing Ubuntu or Fedora and spun up a VirtualBox VM to run their legally purchased copy of Windows.

A lawsuit would be very reasonable. The hard part would be deciding on suitable damages, because the reality is that we’re not just talking about the cost of restoring a computer; these days, a trashed machine is more like somebody breaking into your room and destroying all of your personal stuff.

The really sad thing is that it should have taken about 2 or 3 people at Microsoft, tops, to anticipate the first 10 things that could not only go wrong with their upgrade plan, but very, very wrong. Were those reasonable people shouted out of the room?

I think it's much easier to believe in Microsoft Astroturfing given all the other pretty-well-documented sleazy stuff going on at the same time. In for a penny, in for a pound...

It's suspicious as hell that Microsoft isn't being taken to task over this. If it had happened in the 2000->XP transition era, or even in the Vista->7 era, Ballmer would have been crucified.

Anyone who doesn't find the relatively tolerant/benign online reaction to Windows Update's recent behavior to be suspicious either a) hasn't been paying attention for about 20 years now; b) isn't very bright; or c) is being paid.

Downmod all you want, but somebody has to call BS on this.

This is madness.

I've actually had the "opposite" problem. Ever since Win10 came out, my Win7 machine doesn't bother announcing when updates are available. I have to remember to install them myself ever "patch Tuesday".

But I repeat: this is madness. What kind of a psycho update mechanism would try to install an new OS behind your back?

> I've actually had the "opposite" problem. Ever since Win10 came out, my Win7 machine doesn't bother announcing when updates are available. I have to remember to install them myself ever "patch Tuesday".

I also had this issue until I sat down and figured out how to make Windows Update stop forcing Windows 10 on me. Basically, you need to remove KB3035583, hide it from updates AND uncheck the box to "give me recommended updates the same way I receive important updates". Otherwise, it would keep coming back.

This latest patch Tuesday also introduced another "update" to trigger Win10 installation, it's called: upgrade to Windows 10 Pro, version 1511, 10586

Hiding that in Windows Update got me back to installing the normal updates.

Microsoft is making this whole process way too painful for those of us who know we don't want to update.

That will work until they make KB3035583 "Important" again.

Basically, the way they're going, it's only a matter of time before Win 7 & 8 basically don't work anymore.

Eh. I just turn updates off. It solves the issue sufficiently.

Yes. Pretty much this. You do need some updates though, and Microsoft hardly does a good job of describing what each update does from WU itself, so hope you like looking up each individual update on the MS website.

Eventually they'll just start obfuscating what an update does on the website as well, if not lying outright.

If not lying outright?

There's no grand conspiracy here. Put the tinfoil hat away...

The time to make jokes about tinfoil hats is long past. It's no longer debatable that we're seeing either incompetence or malice on Microsoft's part.

I don't know which, and don't really care. Either way, there's a case to be made for disabling updates entirely.

Well, they already say within WU itself that KB3035583 is to resolve "important issues in Windows" which is a lie. But lying about what the update does on their page for the update at microsoft.com is somehow a stretch?

I really don't care why they chose to do this hijack-update.

When I'm lied to about updating, and it takes bloody forever normally, it pisses me off. When you start trying to hijack my machine for your purposes "for Win10", you can collectively fuck off.

I'll set on my Windows Machine (yes singular, all others are Linux variants) for No-update Windows 7. And I'll also switch everyone I know to no-update as well.

That's why you "hide" it too. Then it won't come back. I have other "important" updates for drivers that have not returned.

You can only hide it for as long as they don't refresh that update. Once they make a change to KB3035583 it won't be hidden anymore and, if they make it important at the same time, guess what's going to happen?

I've "hidden" KB3035583 half a dozen times in the last year (even posting here about how ridiculous this all was and being promptly flamed to ashes). It always comes back eventually.

Well, I can only say after I have hidden it some months ago, it has never came back (on multiple systems). There could be other factors at play.

I'm pretty sure even an update changed from recommended to important will stay hidden too. Though, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that can be overridden.

At least Windows Update makes it obvious when it (Windows 10 installer) returns in some form.

EDIT: clarified last line.

On that topic, she just said that she has spent that past 2 days trying to get wifi to work. Does anyone here have suggestions for fixing/debugging this? I haven't used windows in quite a while, so my approach is just to go into device manager and try to click on 'update driver', find and diagnose problems etc. Tried deleting and re-creating the wifi connection, re-entering the password. The wifi connection appears, and we can 'connect' to it, but it says 'no internet access' but wifi can't access 192.168.0.1 (the router). The wired connection works fine. I don't know much about Windows sub-systems. I'm pretty sure all the Windows 10 updates have downloaded and installed.

Given that it appears to partially work, I would guess that the auto-updated driver doesn't work properly on Windows 10. Can you determine the model / chipset of the wireless card?

Dell Wireless 1703 802.11b/g/n is as much detail as I've been able to get. She's trying to download some drivers from the Dell site at the moment (I'm very fortunate that she is computer literate enough to do this much).

My fiancee (at her daughter's recommendation) allowed the Windows 10 upgrade to proceed on her Lenovo T530. It suffered the same Wifi symptoms you reported. We followed the same course of action to repair the problem, to no avail. Reverted to Windows 7 using the Windows 10 downgrade procedure, but the Wifi still failed to work properly. We successfully restored Windows 7 from a recent image backup.

I've had no problems performing Windows 10 clean installs on several machines, but have been far too skeptical to believe Microsoft could pull off a mass upgrade of the Windows 7/8 installed base.

I wonder what upgrade failure rate they deemed acceptable during their deployment testing?

I faced an issue on my new Asus laptop Atheros wifi adapter. Changing the channel from 11 to Auto on my roouter did the trick and things are fine since then.

>Also, there seems to be a number of people here commenting very strongly in favour of Microsoft, which I find very surprising.

I think it's an issue of trust.

On the one hand, Microsoft have taken some positive steps - making meaningful OSS contributions, following standards in Edge, making sensible statements about crypto etc.

On the other hand, Microsoft have an atrocious track record of corporate citizenship, typified by the Halloween memos. While they have been making progress, they are still a long way from perfect. Even if their current actions were beyond reproach, rebuilding trust takes time.

I think some people on HN want to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt, while others think it's just the same old bullshit under a new coat of paint. Personally, I think we should take each issue on merit. Praise where praise is due and criticise where criticism is due.

Drive-by-upgrade... Happened to my wife's Windows 8 computer late last week with no warning. She was puzzled to wake up to a computer that had been upgraded without asking her. Then she couldn't use our home printer. So she went to work to print something. But then she couldn't use the work WiFi.

I know that her Windows 10 experience will be better than her terrible Windows 8 experience, but this seems clearly to be a maneuver to minimize the Software Support Reserve line on the Income Statement.

I'm all for upgrading users from a crappy Windows 8 to a nice Windows 10. That said, my wife is a reasonably sophisticated user and she didn't notice any significant notification before her computer was upgraded.

[... And, when I talked with her about the upgrade, she mentioned that she was now getting toolbar pop-ups asking her "How likely are you to recommend Windows to a friend?" WTF.]

> The worst part of this is that if you can't get internet, you can't even download new drivers to try and debug the problem.

I have a friend who made a slipstream installer of XP that was the barebones base installer... plus 696 network drivers. I think it was 696, may have been 676. He'd found a package of "every XP network driver ever". Anyway, "This iso will install XP that can get you connected to download everything else..." made for a very useful bit of kit.

Just anecdotally : I have my grandmother, brother, and his mother on Kubuntu, and my mother on Lubuntu. So far, the most updates anyone has gone through is 3 (my mother went from 10.04 to 12.04 to 14.04 and soon 16.04) and we have never had an issue. Oh, and you get to chose when to do the upgrades rather than having them backdoored on you.

Desktop Linux works fine for regular people. They aren't going to go digging in the terminal to brick their own computer. Show them the software center and that their app store uses things online called apt links and anyone with a smartphone understands it fine.

Set my girlfriend up with a Chromebook for this very reason.

An "open and go" computer that fits her needs (and reduces the tech support calls to me)

> Also, there seems to be a number of people here commenting very strongly in favour of Microsoft, which I find very surprising. Perhaps people from MS trying to do damage control?

Sometime in the last couple years Microsoft has realized how important online discussion is to a company's reputation and has begun an aggressive campaign of let's call it "community outreach".

Unfortunately though it appears to me to be astro turfing, the admins here and elsewhere seem to believe it to be legitimate, so whatever techniques they're using are sophisticated.

> Also, there seems to be a number of people here commenting very strongly in favour of Microsoft

Count me (shockingly) in the pro Microsoft group here. After years and years of supporting family PCs, I understand and appreciate what they're trying to do.

If you make updating something the user has to do, they'll never do it.

If you prompt them to update, they'll never do it. Even if they've had the why of it explained to them many, many times.

In anticipation of the inevitable "well this update famously broke X": yes, the risk of an update doing something funky outweighs the risk of running software with known and possibly currently exploited vulnerabilities.

So safety is more important than freedom? The attorney general and the FBI must really love you.

We don't force people to vaccinate their kids, even though unvaccinated kids are a risk to herd immunity. What makes you think it's OK to force users to update their computers?

Actually, we do. We here in California have pockets of parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids — to the point where a school full of them starts to lose herd immunity. Within the past twelve months, our governor signed a law significantly tightening the requirements to get an exemption; http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_28407108/gov-jerry-brown-signs... says that only medical exemptions will get you out of vaccinating your kids here in California.

Even if Microsoft was just tired of having to ask the user for every little thing, there is a gulf between “ask the user if he or she wants to update” and “auto-install multi-gigabyte blob that changes everything, over a data plan that we don’t pay for, affecting users in dozens of ways that we cannot possibly know in advance” (as Microsoft has now chosen to do).

Microsoft could have started really small with this, even updating a single app. There is no non-marketing reason to simultaneously change massive amounts of software. And since it is now clear that parts of Windows 10 really are half-baked (like duplicate settings panels), there are clearly some things that should have waited for a later update, once there was time to finish them.

And you know, Microsoft has made billions and billions from software so frankly they do not get to screw around here. Nobody with that much money and that many engineers should get an ounce of sympathy for being so incompetent. They needed to start by doing a lot less, with a lot more care and attention.

The only problem with that is that Windows 10 is, from a privacy perspective, a downgrade from 7 and 8. Many people are not fond of the UI changes, either, and of course Windows Store is just utter shit, as well.