The final Windows 10 free upgrade nag will be full-screen | Hacker News Reader

The final Windows 10 free upgrade nag will be full-screen

arstechnica.co.uk

45 pointsrosstex58 comments

I think for Microsoft the cost of maintaining old releases outweighs the backfire caused by the forced upgrades.

This. As painful as it may be in the short term it will be beneficial in the long term. What MS is desparatly trying to avoid is having a critical mass of users who stick with win7 from here on out like what happened with XP. After dealing with that for years they want to cut off the appendix before it makes them sick this time around and who can blame them.

When some big 0day hits 7 all those consumers and small/medium businesses who turned a surprise win10 upgrade into "well we may as well go with 10 on everything at this point" will probably stop complaining.

Microsoft's can wish that everybody updated to the current version, but fantasies that aren't based in reality usually remain a fantasy.

There are a large variety of reasons to not upgrade, or upgrade later. Pretending these use cases don't exist or that they should ignore their own requirements just because Microsoft (or any other vendor) would find it convenient is a demonstration of how little they care about their users.

This push to force everyone into a monoculture has been so successful (lol), it has increased[1] the market share of Windows 7*.

> who can blame them

Their customers that expected a well engineered product, but are instead handed an ultimatum to accept new features, new bugs, new incompatibilities, and an order to upgrade at the vendor's convenience.

The point is to server the customer's needs, not the vendor's convenience.

[1] https://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=11&qpaf=&qp...

The market is going towards increased sophistication and incremental updates for operating systems. At the same time you have to be able to compete with low cost or free alternatives. Pretending that you can do that, without limiting the number of versions you have to maintain, is worse in the long-term.

Well then they'd be wise to offer free Windows 10 upgrades to Windows 7 users forever instead of charging for it after July 29th 2016. And yes, I know they have to make money, but Apple hasn't charged for an OS upgrade in ~3 (soon to be 4) years now and that is their competition. If they were serious about getting people to use Windows 10 they'd let people stay on 7 until their compatibility concerns are fixed.

I'll ignore the Apple comment since everyone knows the reason for that. What we don't currently know (I think) is if Microsoft will charge a premium for upgrades after the 29th. From what I've read they haven't announced upgrade pricing which means it either won't have an upgrade version (i.e. you pay full price) or it will be a dirt cheap and they won't announce it in hope they get more Win10 installs before the expire date.

> The free upgrade offer will end on July 29 and we want to make sure you don’t miss out. After July 29th, you’ll be able to continue to get Windows 10 on a new device, or purchase a full version of Windows 10 Home for $119.

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/05/05/windo...

It seems there will be no other upgrade path than paying $119. But of course it's not unlikely that they will be forced to extend the offer or give some other option.

From the attached article:

«The free Windows 10 upgrade offer ends on July 29, after which you'll be charged £99/€135/$119 for Windows 10 Home or £190 for Windows 10 Pro.»

The upgrade costs are in line with historic upgrade costs for Windows.

Indeed I know the reason for it. However the fact remains that Windows cannot be both more expensive and worse, which in my opinion it is.

Yea, I have been thinking of selling Windows to a non profit foundation for a while now.

They will continue to do security updates for Win7 for years. I think what is happening is that MS realizes that Windows version fragmentation would get more expensive in the longer term. Win10 does have LTSB, but limited to enterprise customers.

I've got a fairly old Win7 machine, and it just works. Quite happy to do something else in 2020 when win7 maintenance ends, but not now. Too many horror stories, and no compelling reasons to upgrade.

Sure, I don't like the direction that windows is taking in terms of privacy, having to deal with compatibility issues or the disregard for people on limited connections. But that isn't worse that the flaws of other operating systems. The basic premise is the same, I use windows because it's offers the best value to me in terms of ecosystem. Windows 10 is probably the best engineered windows yet, it will offer goodies as ubuntu on windows and I do my part to curb fragmentation. "The devil you know" attitude is something that has plagued things like Internet infrastructure for a long time, with dire consequences.

I do get why people don't want to update in some cases though, but I have a harder time to seeing a good reason for the backlash.

I actively avoid Windows now after Windows 10, I was ambivalent before. It's unfortunate that Linux on desktop has kinda stagnated, as if they got their act together they could really take over with the behavior Microsoft is pushing in 10.

you should try Fedora 24.

The best opportunities, Windows XP being retired and Apple neglecting their pro users, have already past. With Google entering the market there is even less holes in the market today for other Linux variants.

Oddly it seems that browser tracking sites are reading ChromeOS as Linux. Because there seems to have been a recent uptick in Linux computers registered.

Is Apple really neglecting their pro users? I'm a pro user and after three years of using a Mac I'm just way way more productive than I ever was after ten years of Windows usage. Every time I see something cool in Windows 10 (like Linux subsystem, PowerShell package manager, etc) that might make me switch back I remember how shitty the control panel is, how cluttered the interface is, how bad the system search is, how poorly designed everything else seems. And yes, I know they're working on these things but the problem is OS X has had them for nearly 15 years now and Microsoft is still figuring it out. What is OS X/MacOS missing for pro users on the software side? I'll admit the hardware could use an update (likely later this year) but I'm pretty content with the way everything works in software right now. With macOS 10.12 we'll be getting an amazing new file system too.

I have to use Windows 10 for CAD software and sometimes playing games and it's inarguably the best Windows so far. Unfortunately, that's not saying much.

Yes, my understanding is that they did (and to some degree continue to), especially before the new Mac Pro. We're talking about users that spend 99% of their time in an application suite.

Not true. MS will support Windows 7 until 2020 and Windows 8.1 until at 2023. (security updates aka "extended support") And Windows 10 has a official 10-year support lifecycle, = 2025. http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-commits-to-10-year-su... and https://support.microsoft.com/help/13853/windows-lifecycle-f...

Something that might have helped that cause is skipping the behavior which resulted in widespread news stories saying Windows 10 was sending all sorts of potentially privacy-damaging information to Microsoft and you couldn't turn that off.

(Except in Enterprise. There you can turn it off. But Microsoft won't sell that to individuals.)

They're going about this the wrong way.

The little use my Windows 7 PC gets is for games. I have zero incentive to upgrade to Windows 10 as everything still works fine.

They should take their win10 advertising budget and throw it at a popular games studio to make an exclusive for the new OS. That'll have a much bigger impact on conversions.

Please never say that again. It's bad enough that all the Xbox ports are Windows 10 exclusive.

AoE3 outright refused to install on Windows 2000, required WXP. Put me off for a long time (though turned out I hated AoE3 when I tried it).

I seem to recall Just Cause 2 required either Vista or W7.

I think Microsoft Studios announced somewhat recently that all future games would come to Windows 10.

Microsoft had a deal with Motiga to make Gigantic a Window 10 exclusive. It backfired big time with the community when a lot of Alpha/Beta testers refused to switch away from Windows 7.

They ended up signing a new deal with Perfect World Entertainment and Gigantic will now not be a Windows 10 exclusive after all.

The two most recent blog posts at https://www.motiga.com/ show a nice contrast:

https://www.motiga.com/blog/studio/motiga-announces-microsof...

https://www.motiga.com/blog/studio/perfect-world-partners-wi...

The problem is Apple does the exact same thing if not more frequently. So what options do you really have. Ubuntu, which is good but not sure if runs the games you need. Keep in mind Windows 10 is a better operating system than Windows 7.(SSD, filesystem, Hyperv, and soon WLS) I can see how the upgrade window is aggressive but this is the last version of Windows.

Well, the font rendering is worse. (Maybe it's better for 4K or something, but at HD, it's garbage.)

Which game could not run in Windows 10 but 7?

Heh, I did a Windows 7 -> Windows 10 upgrade mostly because of Quantum Break, a Windows 10 exclusive. Haven't actually played it too much, but perfectly happy with the upgrade.

Windows 10 has a new DirectX version that is exclusive to it, and several new games are already coming out for Windows only if you have Windows 10. (The one's via the store.) I recommend reading about Xbox Play Anywhere which is coming out soon, and will be Windows 10 only.

You absolutely have a strong incentive to upgrade to Windows 10, particularly while it's still free.

I'd actually love to be able to upgrade, but I use Windows 7 as a Virtualbox guest and all I get when I try to upgrade is "Unfortunately, this PC is unable to run Windows 10" due to the VirtualBox Graphics Adapter.

I've gotten Win10 to install by forcing it a couple of times, but it runs like a dog and the guest extension don't seem to work.

I run a Windows 10 guest in Virtualbox and it works fine. Well, about as fine as I expect from desktops in Virtualbox.

Was it an upgrade from 7 or a new install? 7 works fantastic (been using it for a couple years). My brief experience with 10 as a guest was that VB was not ready for it and it was a buggy mess, screen glitches, couldn't get guest additions to support native resolutions, etc.

It was a new install. You have to tell Virtualbox which OS it is going to run, though I am not sure what it does differently. It seems you can change the setting afterwards.

You may just have bad luck. It always takes me a day to get Virtualbox running correctly on a new PC, no matter how many times I have done it in the past.

Well, I guess Microsoft does not have any more consumer trust to lose, so they may as well go at full speed to try and promote Win10 that way.

I hope the "Do not notify my again" option really does what it says this time.

Unfortunately, I doubt that Microsoft will simply stop nagging people after July 29. They'll either extend the free upgrade indefinitely, or change the pop-ups to read something like "Limited time offer, 80% off!"

Not to mention the trickery of putting it on the other side of the screen, in low-contrast text. Purple on purple?

MS has no decency or plausible deniability here. They want to remove the end user's choice and rely upon trickery.

I recently bought a Thinkpad with W7 Pro. I have no real use for Windows right now, and I'm thinking of wiping that disk to install a BSD on it.

But things change, and I if I'm lucky, I may (have to) do a little bit of software development (porting at least) for Windows in a year or two. Most likely people will want Windows 10 support at that point. In my situation, would you recommend upgrading?

EDIT: I've considered using a VM for Windows, but I don't know if it'll be painfully slow. And I'm not sure if I can get a copy of Windows for that purpose free of charge.

Yup. Get the upgrade. Even if you uninstall immediately once you see Windows 10 is activated, getting the free upgrade now entitles your hardware to it for life.

And UWP development does require Windows 10.

I would recommend a VM, which is what I do for all systems I need to develop for but not use as my everyday system.

Note that VMs often will not get the necessary IDs to entitle the PC itself to the upgrade. Switching between a VM and bare metal will change the entitlement as Microsoft sees it, and I'm not totally sure entitlements will work on VMs at all. Just in case, I'd upgrade the PC itself, even if you do it with a spare hard drive or something.

Hmm, you're right, I'm not sure what will happen to the license itself. It's just what I do when I need to develop for systems that I won't use for other things.

It's interesting that the big update to W10 ("Redstone") arrives a couple of days after the free offer ends. Perhaps they want the last minute rush of cajoled upgraders to be greeted with a known stable version, rather than the latest and greatest which could have issues to shake out.

running a redstone insider build on my laptop right now. it seems more stable than their release branch and a lot of the UI inconsistencies were fixed. of course I cannot speak for every PC out there but I know of cases with the current stable build not working on some PCs which means that one is not a stability monster either.

they should have either extended the free upgrade offer for a month or released Redstone earlier. it doesn't make sense to make someone upgrade today and then force them to re-upgrade to redstone a few days later.

Or maybe it's just that maintaining the direct upgrade from Windows 7 is only going to be a bigger expense as the platforms diverge. I wouldn't be too surprised if they planned to retire that path completely and force people to install Windows 10 from scratch in the future.

The timing was originally intended to coincide (the version tag is 1607 as in this month), but was pushed back a bit.

My impression is that they probably would have loved some of the upgraders to skip right along to the "Anniversary Update". (Running Insider Preview builds on one of my machines, it is a good polish update for Windows 10 in most ways.)

Have they announced the price for upgrading after the deadline?

£99/€135/$119 for Windows 10 Home or £190 for Windows 10 Pro.

So if I've upgraded, and then downgraded (twice!), will Microsoft remember, and let me upgrade later, when 7 goes off support?

Microsoft must be really desperate.

Wondering what Windows 7 users are going to be using 4 years from now.... can't hold back the flood forever so not sure why they're still so insistent about it when MS has made their intentions so clear.

My father still uses winxp laptop to play dosbox games so I think people will be fine.

They'll be using ever more malware infested Windows 7 installs.

What is this urge to tell people what to do with their time and money?

I'll hold back for as long as my computer does everything I need it to do with no trouble. These forced upgrades is how arbitrary obsolescence is implemented.

My plan is Win8.1

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