Microsoft pushes full-screen ads for Copilot+ PCs on Windows 10 users

Having lived from before the start of "PC software" to the present, one of the things that warped people was that as the market is growing and you have lots of people getting computers for the first time, you can sell them a copies of your software and get revenue every year. Once you hit saturation, your 'new sales' market goes effectively to zero[1]. For software that is 'done' (which is to say does everything it says it does) you're only choice is to "add features" or "add recurring revenue" (or as Intuit likes to do add a feature that generates recurring revenue).

A much better plan (seeing it from this side), is to invest in a 'cold start' archive. Capture as much knowledge about the implementation and building of the software into an archive that a person 'skilled in the art' could access, and recreate the entire process from scratch to create a version of the software compatible with a new platform. Then record what it took to get it to the new platform and re-archive it. Similarly for fixing bugs. Yes it's boring maintenance work but ideally 90+% of the time the software incurs zero staff costs sitting in its archive. When that is the case, the cost of a bug fixed version or sales on a new platform handily cover the cost of the staff/operation needed to maintain it.

No need to suck blood out of a stone as they say.

[1] It isn't precisely zero but it can get pretty close.

Anyway, here's the countermeasure I use to prevent Win10's obnoxious fullscreen upgrade-to-11 ads.

It's one line. Run in admin cmd. Result will be Success if the task exists or an error it couldn't find it.

     schtasks.exe /change /tn "\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\RUXIM\PLUGScheduler" /disable

It feels like there must be a ton of systems out there with pre 8th Gen Intel CPUs and with no TPM. On the one hand, PCs are cheap enough nowadays that maybe MS can force them to replace it, not to mention that cell phones and other mobile devices have taken the place of the primary personal computer for most regular people.

On the other hand, Windows 10 might end up sticking around much longer in the same way that XP did. In which case MS might be forced to support it with security updates beyond 2025, or be forced to release a version of Win 11 without the CPU and TPM requirements.