When Microsoft Plans to End Its Free Windows 10 Upgrade Offer | Hacker News Reader

When Microsoft Plans to End Its Free Windows 10 Upgrade Offer

hothardware.com

32 pointsrbanffy44 comments

Microsoft will never end the Windows 10 upgrade offer. They want all Win 7 and 8/8.1 users on Win 10. The advantages of having a device upgrade from 7->10 include the following:

- Windows 10 has a more restrictive license. Telemetry sharing and automatic updates cannot be turned off on all Win 10 upgrades.

- The shrinking and eventual elimination of Windows 7 devices means fewer older devices to support, fewer patches to backport, etc.

- People that have paid for their Windows 7 license offer no further revenue to Microsoft. Microsoft is basically losing money on them, being obliged to continue supporting a device that paid for its license five years ago. People on Windows 10, however, provide "value" (as a stand-in for direct revenue) to Microsoft in the form of analytics and telemetry.

- People on Windows 10 are inherently more likely to participate in Microsoft's other, more profitable subscription-based models ala Office 365.

If this is the case, why bother putting the upgrade behind the "assistive technologies users only" fig leaf? It's going to scare away some number of honest people from upgrading. If your goal is to upgrade the maximum number of devices, wouldn't you want to make the upgrade obviously free for everybody?

It already is - if you enter a Windows 7 key during installation of Windows 10 it works without any issues. The only problem is that it's completely non-obvious to the final user, MS is not advertising this anywhere as far as I know.

Many users do not have they key, since the OEMs stopped gluing the labels on the machines. They have only a SLIC entry in the firmware, so that's an additional hurdle.

Probably to keep up the illusion of the story that people think it's worth paying for Windows upgrades.

Microsoft has established support timelines. They will have to backport fixes and carryout whatever level of support they do regardless of how many people upgrade, because it will never be 100%. More users on Win10 just means a better pitch to app developers about using the latest Store-enabled APIs.

But you're right they want to show improving numbers and then mine users for ads. MS absolutely hates how they let online/mobile/advertising slip out of their grasp due to terrible management. So they're poorly trying to implement the Google model to compensate.

Thing is, they are sucking at it. Let people turn off telemetry, little to lose - unless they want to condition people all they are doing is fomenting anger towards MS. And if you're going to go all in, then have some taste. Fix the store. Stop spamming shit in the start menu. But take a look at XBox with its ad-covered dashboard and we can see MS just does not get it and is doomed to poorly trying to ape others and doing it with zero class.

But hey at least we are getting nicer dev stories from them! I love that enterprises enjoy paying crazy prices for Azure "solutions" as it subsidizes MS investing in dev tech.

I don't even mind the telemetry data as some of the in your face passive advertising and additional "features" and apps I could care less about. I finally went linux on my home desktop a few months ago, I was so sick of it. No, I don't want Edge as my main browser. No, wtf is this contacts thing you added in that I can't seem to remove. Can you please get rid of these cards for apps I don't have installed? No, I don't want to install MS-* now..

I mean, just give me a nice OS to work with.. hell, I like Windows 10 fine, if they'd stop shoving adware down the update channel.

> No, wtf is this contacts thing you added in that I can't seem to remove.

HKCU:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\People, key PeopleBand of type Dword, set to 0.

However, normal people should not resort to configuring their system via registry. This should be normal, disableable feature, if it has to be there at all.

Do not forget to re-check after earch update.

And yes, I do mind the telemetry data. So do I mind resetting the user preferences by updates and forced updates too.

I mean, I don't like the telemetry... but the telemetry isn't in my face reminding me it's there all the time.

"Normal people" are right-clicking the taskbar and clearing "Show People on the taskbar" checkbox.

Or even more straightforward: Settings -> Personalization -> Taskbar.

Hell, I go to support.dell.com to look at drivers for my laptop, and Cortana pops up, "Can I interest you in a coupon?"

I mean WTF.

Whoa wtf. Is that Edge only?

Yeah. :\ Another reason not to use it.

How many times do we have to go over this...

Telemetry != Tracking

Telemetry data has been gathered since Windows XP and it's gathered in the magical Windows 7. It's not new. It's used to identify problems with their software and how it interacts with users systems. It's also used to understand how users are using the software and what issues they encounter.

Microsoft even provides documentation of everything captured under basic tracking.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/configuration/basic...

> How many times do we have to go over this...

As many times as it takes for people like yourself stop switching the subject and feigning surprised frustration.

It has never been about "telemetry" or "tracking". It's always been about not "phoning home" under pretense du jour.

It is all about _privacy_ and _control_ over one's own computer, the very notions that's been steadily eroded to near oblivion through constant and unyielding pressure from Microsoft et al.

>_control_

You are running several millions of lines of possibly closed source code written by others running on almost definitely closed design hardware. At some level you have to trust your platform.

Trust is not binary. I trust Microsoft not to, say, deliberately weaken Bitlocker. I trust them to generally keep me safe and not turn on my webcam and watch me at night.

It does not mean I trust them building up a profile on me. Someone in this thread said Cortana pops up coupon offers when visiting Dell.com? I do not trust this to not be abused.

It is also about the overton window and shifting people's acceptance of spying, even in innocent forms like crash metrics. I've defended telemetry and used to turn it on for most machines, because it was optional. Making it mandatory is the wrong policy.

It's on by default in 8.1, 8, 7, Vista, and XP. It's also on by default in Office since XP.

When was it optional?

I'm not saying you're wrong, but you're saying XP collected lists of installed apps? And had no way to disable? Citation? This is more than DrWatson/crash reporting.

It reminds me of an old /b/ wheeze:

There was this memetic image called either "Cockmongler" or "Grinman". Which of those names was correct? Why, whichever one the mark didn't use, of course! If the pigeon said "Cockmongler", you had a whole rant ready to copy-paste about how it was always "Grinman" and oldfags know this and /b/ is now cancerous and yadda yadda yadda. Vice-versa in the converse, of course; the point is, the other person is always wrong.

You can apply the same thing to "ship" vs "boat" or "half-staff" vs "half-mast" or "that" vs "which" or any other pair; it's a wonderful way to utterly derail any attempt at discussion involving those terms, or, possibly, the concepts they're attached to.

Agreed. I don't have a problem with telemetry and updates being turned on as by default. What I have a problem with is Microsoft not even giving us the option to turn these features off.

Again, this isn't a new problem and it's actually better in Windows 10 than it's ever been as far as choice.

If the problem is choice, not that the telemetry gathering exists then everyone really needs to reframe their argument because everyone complains first about the collection and then second about the inability to turn it off.

How is it better than ever as far as choice? I can't turn it off!

Really? Sounds like Windows 10 cannot turn of this telemetry stuff. And sends my installed apps. But not allowing turning it off is not excusable. All it does is piss people off and encourage the public to accept phoning home as a fact of life and nothing to see.

As did every other version of Windows since XP.

The Windows 10 PC's in our office are a constant source of headaches. Random errors and crashes all the time. I don't get it. Windows 7 gives us almost zero problems.

My gaming PC will have Win7 until I'm forced to upgrade.

> Telemetry sharing and automatic updates cannot be turned off on all Win 10 upgrades.

I turned it off with my pfsense firewall whitelist.

It’s my hardware, and it communicates to whom I want, when I want.

Article synopsis: "When do they plan to end the offer? This article doesn't know. Probably the end date MS themselves specify. Oh you thought it was over already? Well did you know that if you need assistive tech, or say you do on the honor system, you can still get the Win 10 free upgrade? Interesting, eh?"

Gen I get this for every article on HN? Maybe a userscript or extension with HN link synopsis?

Strange thing is, I didn't realise the regular offered ended and successfully upgraded 4 Windows 8.1 machines in the last month or so without any issue or doing anything regarding "Assistive tech".

I just put the Windows 10 ISO from the Microsoft site on a USB, kicked the install off, entered the Windows 8.1 licence key from the OEM sticker on the machine and it happily installed and activated.

Not sure if I'm an edge case with some peculiarity with our hardware vendor, but was surprised to learn the upgrade window finished sometime ago...

If the machines are branded laptops (or branded desktops like Dell or something) this can be an expected behavior: the license key that the Windows 10 licensing code checks and accepts by design could have been stored in the machine. It is still machine and vendor dependent.

If you've made any of the machines, e.g. by buying a motherboard or a barebone and then by installing Windows 8.1 yourself, it's a news to me.

EDIT: I'm especially interested in upgrades, not in "clean" installs. Most of the users don't want to start from the scratch with configuring every program they use.

I did an W10 clean install on a friend's selfbuilt PC using his 8.1 product key. Activated just fine.

OEM BIOS unlocks tend to not work between Windows versions. I've experimented with this a little. My go-to method to upgrade these is to clean install the version that will BIOS unlock, activate it, then upgrade that to Windows 10. After you upgrade, you can clean install Windows 10 on the system and it will activate normally.

You don't even need to do the trick in this article. According to Paul Thurrott, you can still activate with a Windows 7 or 8.1 key: https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/142616/yes-can-s...

Ah, I just posted about my experience below on this. I can confirm this worked for me, with no lies about "Assitive Tech" within the last month with 4 different OEM Windows 8.1 licences.

Yep, I've installed a fresh copy of Windows 10 using a Windows 7 key that has never been used to upgrade to Windows 10 before just the other week - it all worked without any issue, the system activated itself fine. No tricks needed.

Microsoft never stopped allowing you to activate Windows 7/8 product keys on Windows 10 installation media. I think they've stopped advertising the free upgrades as it was (supposedly) putting a damper on new PC sales[1].

1. https://www.networkworld.com/article/3098044/computers/its-o...

Still can't actually opt out of forced updates (non-critical security at least)? Still can't actually kill the extremely invasive telemetry? Still can't get LTSB/equivalent as an individual user to help resolve the aforementioned issues?

Still not interested.

I've got rid of updates and some of the tracking on my Win10 pro by disabling the associated windows services. Other annoying quirks like the OneDrive icon can be removed by editing the registry. I do wish that Microsoft would provide an easier way to do this.

There are a few automated scripts that do this... what was it, 98 lite or something like that back in the day... need something similar for windows 10.

> LTSB/equivalent

It's purchasable online but the source of the keys is probably sketchy.

Interestly the US page[0] gives an end date of the end of the year but the GB page[1] doesn't and the FAQ for the GB page states they "will make a public announcement before ending the offer".

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/accessibility/windows10upgra...

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/accessibility/windows10upgra...

I work faster on win7. Why switch

They're the same OS, how would you be "faster" on 7?

when OS doesnt get in the way, and keyboard shortcuts work.

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