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Comment by scholia | Hacker News Reader

There were free utilities that blocked the update.

Also, for the record, I never saw any attempt at a forced upgrade across three different machines... even though I made no attempt to block them. This makes me doubtful about "forced upgrade" stories.

Hoever, even if someone correctly claimed that they were forced to upgrade and didn't, along the way, accept the Windows 10 terms and conditions, it was dead easy to roll back to the previous OS. Far easier, in fact, than coping with a ransomware attack.

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> I never saw any attempt ...

If we're adding personal anecdotes, then I'd like to file my own experience. A lab colleague's computer upgraded to Windows 10 in front of my own eyes. All she did was leave it alone long enough for her to go and drink some water. It was the only computer in our group which had the 3D modelling software we needed, and the update managed to break that. (I think we tried the roll-back too and that failed). Anyway, this was a few hours before our assignment was due. That is not a time to be left without one's tools.

I talked about this before here on Hacker News. Many others did. Some journalists also covered it.

Even I couldn't believe the shady tricks everyone was accusing Microsoft of until I saw it with my own eyes. But then again, I should also have realized that if so many people feel tricked, then it doesn't really matter if it was technically a trick or not.

If it wasn't technically a trick, then it sure was designed to fool users, evidenced by the sheer number of people fooled into it.

Even I couldn't believe the shady tricks everyone was accusing Microsoft of

A free upgrade?

Is that more or less shady than Microsoft charging for upgrades?

> I think we tried the roll-back too and that failed.

I did a few roll-backs to test the system and they worked perfectly. However, if you're upgrading 400 million PCs, there will inevitably be some errors.

This is why we have backups ;-)

> evidenced by the sheer number of people fooled into it.

How many do you think there were, and what's the percentage error over 400 million or more upgrades?

Never10 was one of those utilities I've used in the past. Resorted to this or Group Policy to prevent Win10 upgrade only after Microsoft's persistence in pushing GWX related updates under changing names over the span of several months. Maybe not forced but likely intentionally deceptive upgrades. Have personally seen 2 PC's fail the rollback within a week of upgrade. Was able to extract system restore files and reinstall with source media then restore but had sys restore service been off it would have been a permanent 'trial' upgrade.

>However, even if someone correctly claimed that they were forced to upgrade and didn't, along the way, accept the Windows 10 terms and conditions, it was dead easy to roll back to the previous OS. Far easier, in fact, than coping with a ransomware attack.

From who's perspective? Microsoft? This was already fixed, just that people didn't update, because like I said, people just disabled updates. That trust was broken by Microsoft. Even if you are doubtful of 'forced upgrades', you can research for all the evidence yourself. I've had it happen to plenty of machines, and the free utilities, like I said, were negated multiple times as Microsoft kept changing how their win10 update service could be blocked. Sure, there were months where it would be perfectly stable, but if you needed to be sure, you turned off windows update.

> Even if you are doubtful of 'forced upgrades', you can research for all the evidence yourself.

The fact that people claim -- or journalists report -- forced updates doesn't make their claims true. Everybody who deals with real users knows how unaware they are.

Having said that, I agree that the "dark patterns" were a really bad idea. Microsoft actually does know how unaware real users are, and its upgrade offers should have reflected that.

Whether it was worth turning off security updates is another matter, and would depend on the circumstances. For most users, my opinion is that it was stupid.

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