Ask HN: Is Microsoft sabotaging older versions of Windows?

> but I have a batch file I run after every Windows update to get rid of the spyware stuff so that isn't an issue.

Could be that over time whatever your batch script is doing is possibly interfering with the correct operation of OneDrive. You might need to review whatever it's disabling/hacking and make some adjustments. I doubt Microsoft are deliberately trying to sabotage your machine. I suspect whatever your script does is probably not documented well, or is doing "not-recommended" things that may be trampling over incremental updates to OneDrive and unexpectedly and subtly clobbering the way it functions and/or the things it expects to be there. There can be some surprising dependencies in Windows, and Windows does evolve over time due to patches and fixes.

edited: to fix my english

This completely. The idea that people want to explicitly opt out of updates (muh spyware) and yet expect things to magically remain feature current on an outdated platform is ludicrous. There are other options to Windows (and cloud storage for that matter) I really wish people would support them more than just figuring they're entitled to get a business's support even as the deviate from the upgrade path and try to thread water half a decade in the past.

Edit: I posted the batch file here originally but it looked crap so I have removed it.

Here is an example of what it removes:

echo Uninstalling KB2976987 (description not available)

start /w wusa.exe /uninstall /kb:2976987 /quiet /norestart

It's all the updates that enable "telemetry".

You could be right that there is some genuine functionality I have removed by not having a particular update in which case I will need to look at alternatives to OneDrive.

> This is all it does.

Looks non-trivial to me. That's removing 18 patches/fixes, four of which don't have a description.

If I were you I'd re-install, get OneDrive back into working order (if indeed one or more of these uninstalls is the cause), then re-apply these hacks one at a time until OneDrive starts misbehaving....then put it back.

Blindly running a script like this based on "advice" from the internet, without knowing the consequences each time some wave of new patches/fixes arrives on Patch Tuesday, is a wee bit scary. Especially if it's your primary work/wage generating machine.

Rather than a homegrown script, I use: http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/gwx_control_panel.ht...

It works fantastic for me, haven't had any GWX issues since I installed it. Having said that, I don't use OneDrive, so can't say whether it affects it or not.

KB3080149 (the version in the rollup) does say that the new version "Reduces the network connections on a Windows system that doesn't participate in the Windows Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP)."

Who knows, but at the end of the day, they are only going to have so much resources to deal with older versions of Windows.

They seem to be operating with an attitude that if they can get as many people as possible to use their newest version of windows, that they will save money by not having to deal with such a diverse environment of versions.

Something tells me they looked at the way companies like google release their updates often, and by default. Release numbers are becoming less important, more of a tool for developers to use (which is what version numbers were invented for, before marketroids don't got a hold of them). Perhaps a light went on when they saw that chrome just quietly updated, without any fanfare about 'upgrading' to new whole numbers, large features just got included when they were ready, from whichever version they were releasing at the time.

This approach makes alot of sense ongoing, and in the long term. Developers in the past got used to having various versions of their desktop software being in the wild, and it was a part of life. Then people started going, hey with the web, I only need to be supporing one version of our codebase, which is actually pretty awesome. Google came along with chrome and decided that it made sense to have as few versions in the wild as possible. It seems Microsoft is playing catchup with this, but they still have large releases of windows, with interface changes between large versions, which causes folks like you to want to hold onto older versions. Seems they are still working on fine tuning their social engineering.

«I can be programming something in Visual Studio on my desktop and then an hour later I decide to use my laptop and it hasn't syncd»

It sounds like you are looking for an almost live real-time sync. It's not really a use case I think OneDrive has ever prioritized. Certainly it tries its best, but I remember having a lot of issues with the timeliness of OneDrive sync in Windows 8. (It feels like sync has gotten better in 10's client, even with the two steps back in usability.)

I don't think they are intentionally sabotaging it; I would suspect it's more that you've found edge cases in the sync platform.

That said, you may want to consider a different sync platform intended for closer to real-time sync. BitTorrent Sync has been useful to me in that category.

It used to work in almost real-time but the time isn't really the issue: I could leave it forever and it won't sync without manual intervention sometimes

That too has been a complaint I've had somewhat consistently with OneDrive over the years. Every now and then it seemed like OneDrive's file watcher would stop catching file updates and I'd have to restart OneDrive on my machine.

Some of that has also always been OneDrive's natural attempt at throttling usage until the machine is certain levels idle CPU and/or bandwidth. It can be nice knowing that OneDrive will try to avoid major operations while you are busy, but it can also cause strangely long pauses between syncs because your machine is busy with a lot of other background downloads.

>> almost live real-time sync

Is there a reason not to use Dropbox for this use-case? It does live, real-time sync fairly well.

In this use case, BitTorrent Sync has the slight advantage in of it being directly peer-to-peer between the machines without a cloud go-between.

Use Dropbox if it works for you, of course.

From what I've seen, though, Dropbox sync is similar to OneDrive's and it's close enough to real-time that you can use it that way most of the time, but I still think you are in an edge case compared to what a cloud storage tool is likely to optimize for (which is typically save to the cloud first, then eventually sync up all your other machines).

I'd say you are seeing development tradeoff's that they are having to make. Likely code bases, like the one for OneDrive sync, is shared across multiple versions of Windows. That comes with tradeoffs though as newer versions of Windows might have features which are utilized to gain functionality, security or reliability. Then to support the older OS's the team tries to implement similar limited functionality but it isn't as thoroughly tested as the OS likely. Not to mention, think of it this way, if say 70% of your clients are on Windows 10, you'll probably optimize testing and features around that, not anything prior.

I highly doubt this is done specifically to force people to upgrade, or to screw their older versions of Windows. And I am sure more then once a developer or product manage has said, well if they don't like that they can upgrade Windows. If you have ever written a client deployed application you have likely said it too.

They may are just shitty devs as always, maybe thats their tactic. Who knows. Just upgrade to Windows 10, thats what Microsoft wants you to do, and you know yourself you want all that Spyware stuff, else you would not title yourself windows dev.

Did you forget the /s at the end of your post? :)

I don't want the spyware stuff: I have been a dev on Windows for 13 years or so... long before all this forced telemetry stuff and I am running a business based on it so switching to Linux or Mac isn't an option at this point unfortunately.

Windows 7 and 8.1 work fine for the most part and I will be sticking with them but it just seems like there have been subtle changes over the last year or so that are designed to annoy me rather than fundamentaly change or break the way I work.

> I am running a business based on [Windows]

That's the problem; you created a business that depends on a single point of failure that is entirely outs0ide your control. Without a second source[1] or a reliable alternative strategy, your business isn't really under you control.

This is why free[2] software is important. You need the right to maintain the things your business depends on.

> switching to Linux or Mac isn't an option

It's always an option, you simply see the cost of switching to be too high. That's for you to judge, but you might want to consider the long-term direction of MS's goal for Windows. Paying the cost of leaving now might be cheaper than paying it at some point in the future after MS does something else that disrupts your business.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_source

[2] Not "open source"; having the source code doesn't do you any good if you don[t have the freedom to use it.

thanks. I couldnt have said it better. I tried, but OP did understand it as sarcasm.

> you created a business that depends on a single point of failure that is entirely outs0ide your control

I never really thought of it that way before but you are right... I still can't switch to Linux or Mac at this point though so for the short term it's out.

Long term I will have to keep a close eye on Microsoft and see if it's something I have to move away from.

I was always a pay-your-money-get-your-thing kind of guy but this move towards continuous upgrades and possible subscription-based / "free" operating systems isn't a shift I like... I like to "own" my stuff (I know I never "owned" Windows but I had a disk and I paid for it and I got to choose how long I kept it for and I could disable telemetry and so on).

Maybe this IT stuff is a young mans game because the thought of ditching Windows, Visual Studio, SQL Server etc for Linux equivalents and having to re-learn it all doesn't fill me with hope, however, now that I read this sentence back I amd sure someone will correct me and show me that you can run all that stuff, including Active Directory in a 512MB instance of Puppy Linux or something :)

I've been on the Linux journey for about 3 years now and loving all of it. The unix philosophy of small, composable programs just makes sense. Linux/Unix is a system where programmers are the target demographic. No more feeling like a second class citizen in Windows land :)

Not only programmers! My grandmum likes how easy it is to make everything huge and high contrast when needed. My mum is a fan of unity, because everything is just reachable even with limited space. She recently even started to use a tiling plugin. My little sister spends hours customizing her desktop and tried pretty much any window manager. My dad uses linux and wine to play windows games that do not properly run with windows 7 and upwards.

I would classify them all as at best average computer users, but there was not much hand holding involved in the transition at all. And way less work for me now! (Like my mum did open Locky (the crypto trojan) twice!!)

My mom recently tried figuring out video transcoding and editing on her own with her Windows machine. I'm still waiting to see what kinds of crazy malware she picked up in the process.

>> you created a business that depends on a single point of failure that is entirely outs0ide your control

> Long term I will have to keep a close eye on Microsoft and see if it's something I have to move away from.

I think there is a better analogy. Every business buys widgets from other businesses to enable them to function. There is only so much feedback or control you can get over that product, but as long as it meets your needs that's not a concern.

The problem is when you rely on a widget that suddenly has disruptive planned obsolescence, does this new anti-feature impact your business? You control your internal processes, and now an external source is interfering in your change control process.

Certainly you plan to replace widgets as they age on your schedule and budget. The issue is when it is forced on you.

Free software isn't immune from this either, for example the rolling upgrade bandwagon (ie: its fixed in the next revision but it breaks yours) and the systemd debacle where the choice over important system components was removed.

It's not a conspiracy. They just suck.

Try supporting a large O365 environment. Whenever there's a major product release that uses Azure Active Directory, you end up getting redirected to new end points for auth.

Since they also suck at publishing their IP ranges, your users get screwed with random fail until you update your proxy and firewalls.

Office ProPlus is joy too. Try running that on a distributed network where bandwidth is at a premium. Fun UX.

I know they're sabotaging their newer versions :(

FWIW, I didn't bother uninstalling KB updates on my Windows 7 laptop. I let them all install, then used a utility called Spybot Anti-Beacon to disable the Telemetry services:

https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/

You might try giving that a shot.

I'm curious about the reasons for not upgrading to Windows 10 since it's free and likely to be better supported.

Lets all disrupt our workflow! This guy said its free!

It's not free... I need to have paid for a valid Win7 or Win8 license to qualify for "free".

As someone who makes a living off Windows software, surely you have paid for your license? Else you got absolutely no right to complain about anything breaking.

So you are implying I stole Windows? That's your contribution to this?

I think it's more that the situation where a person could have a license compliant installation of Windows without having purchased [for some definition of "purchase"] a copy of Windows is non-obvious.

> So you are implying I stole Windows?

Actually, when you claim that it is not a free upgrade because you need to have paid for a valid license for the software you claim to be using, you are implying that you stole Windows.

The other poster appeared to be presuming that that implication was unintentional and inaccurate, and that the upgrade was indeed free for you.

No, xe was merely pointing out a cost that isn't factored into "free upgrade". You're probably not realizing that to people with long experience of Microsoft marketing, upgrading to Windows hasn't necessarily meant from Windows.

My experience is that the upgrade requires a valid Windows COA number for Windows 7 or Windows 8. COA's have been required since Windows XP Service Pack 2 [or 1 or 3] to install a non-cracked version of Windows.

So far, I've installed Windows 10 four times. Three of them have been on computers I bought used using the used computer's COA.

After nearly a year of panicking about going from 7 to 10 and breaking all my tools, I finally did it a few days ago. Everything worked, nothing broke.