I realize you didn't mean to, but this triggered a whole off-topic discussion about imaginary astroturfing, vote-brigading, and shilling.
When we see evidence of these behaviors we crack down on them hard. But people are far too ready (by at least an order of magnitude, probably two) to impute this behavior to others merely because they have an opposing opinion. That's not evidence, and the discussion should never go there on that (non-)basis.
All: if you suspect astroturfing in HN threads, please let us know at [email protected] so we can investigate, and please don't go on about it in the threads unless there's real evidence. An opposing opinion is not evidence!
I installed a fresh Win10 for a family member, and the complete mess of absent/hidden/redesigned/half-duplicated control panel stuff was my first hint that I'd want to stay on Windows-7.
I am still lost about what to do. Thankfully, after a complete restore to first Win10, I have wired connectivity back.
While I appreciate the rest of your comment, I personally find comment like these are obnoxious. I sincerely doubt that vote and comment brigading are anywhere near as prevalent as reddit and this community seem to so routinely imply. Perhaps I'm the naive one, but it is tiresome to so regularly see comments (especially those close to one's own personal beliefs) consistently labeled indicators of a social media PR campaign because someone just can't believe they might be genuine.
Or maybe I should get my head out of the sand, I do not know.
It can be relatively economic to pay people to post favourable comments if they already enjoy doing it anyway. I suspect that it happens more often than you think, and often takes the form of just paying people to hold biased opinions. It is not hard to imagine that if someone was holding onto a large amount of Microsoft stock, it would be easy to maintain cognitive dissonance.
Well you could just go see post history and call out the obvious one, letting downvotes take care of the rest.
Anyway I had win 10 preinstalled on a laptop and since the last patch craze my wifi stopped working reliably.
I think MS managed to bork something there independently from the os upgrade, but even more interestingly all other computers around here, same make same model, upgraded just fine, so I'd give some credit to the other voices until the actual technical issue is pinned down. At least for the driver issues, the sneaky os update is maddness.
Simply put, the sort of behavior implied (vote brigading) doesn't mesh with my understanding of how I or any of my coworker/HN reader peers tend to behave. I could be totally off the mark with this but it just doesn't mesh with the culture I've been exposed to.
More relevantly however, and more in line with how I typically approach HN threads regardless of topic, let me try and pose a more "occams razor" explanation:
MS has been gaining a lot of positive press lately. The tech community WANTS to see our biggest entities succeed and "do good". We hate seeing suggestions that a "new convert" to the good side might have changed face again. Realizing that a company can do both good and "evil" simultaneously is a degree of mental dissonance I don't often see handled "cleanly" so to say.
Long and the short; I am not happy with the forced upgrades. I am still using 7, and would be rather irked if they broke everything for the sake of forcing through content I do not want. However, I do tend to attribute much more naïve explanations for the patterns we're seeing, over some sort of PR conspiracy. There was a wonderful quote a while back, "we're not organized enough to be that evil" :) I don't mean to be any sort of MS apologist in this, my comment is entirely directed at the discussion regarding some degree of astroturfing, if I got asked about my opinions on the updates, well, that's a whole can of worms on its own and the remaining comments in the thread seem to speak to the resounding sentiment in that respect.
This strikes me as the kind of thing that engineers might be kept in the dark about, but some PR agency somewhere may have outsourced something like this and done so in a way as to provide plausible deniability. A quick googling shows this wouldn't be the first time MS has resorted to astroturfing [1].
So while I don't doubt the sincerity of how you or any of your immediate coworkers/HN reader peers tend to behave, I think the facts speak a bit more clearly to the possibility of other parts of the MS organism being willing to do this sort of thing.
[1] https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
Again, there could certainly be degrees of separation, and as you accurately state I can't in any way speak on that. My main goal was just to speak to the best intentions and actions of the peers I've had the opportunity and privilege to work with.
Was in a similar boat as you, until a new build more or less forced me to use 10 (motherboard only had USB 3. yes, you can slipstream drivers into a 7 installer - but when I tried this, the machine kept bluescreening to high heck). After a few months, I'm perfectly fine with it.
Don't get me wrong, there are problems - but there have always been problems. The two competing but not quite feature matching control panels for example. I also turned notifications completely off, as they were all for trivial BS (in my case).
But overall, I am now just as happy as I was on 7.
I'd like to think that under Satya Nadella's reign they would have stopped, but they are still doing dodgy shit like forced upgrades to Windows 10.
To say that this is an utter PR nightmare is a complete understatement. If, as some comments indicate, they have bricked hardware then I think a class action lawsuit wouldn't be out of the question!
Whoever made the decision to auto upgrade literally hundreds of millions of computers should be fired. I believe that before the auto upgrade Microsoft said there were 110 million installs of Windows 10, but that was still only roughly 10% of total computers. There were still something like 40% of computers running Windows 7. Even if only 1% of computers that get upgraded automatically get bricked due to incompatible drivers, or whatever then that's still well over a million computers Microsoft have borked due to this stupidity.
Look, I can accept automatic upgrades for an existing operating system on consumer grade workstations. But I cannot understand or accept that automatically upgrading to a new major release is a responsible business decision. Microsoft are getting this in the neck, and rightly so. This alone is a good reason for me to recommend to my friends and family that they only buy a Mac, and if they can't that I work out if it's worthwhile installing Ubuntu or Fedora and spun up a VirtualBox VM to run their legally purchased copy of Windows.
The really sad thing is that it should have taken about 2 or 3 people at Microsoft, tops, to anticipate the first 10 things that could not only go wrong with their upgrade plan, but very, very wrong. Were those reasonable people shouted out of the room?
That said, I could do without the insincere well wishes.
To provide context: I was telling people for years before Snowden that "they" were recording everything. Of course, I was dismissed as a wearer of the tin-foil hat, yes? I'm afraid I find naivete a bit frustrating. No excuse for rudeness though! Sorry about that! :-)
Warm regards, and sincere wishes of kindness to you and yours.
Rather like a forced OS upgrade - how many times is too often?
Anyone who doesn't find the relatively tolerant/benign online reaction to Windows Update's recent behavior to be suspicious either a) hasn't been paying attention for about 20 years now; b) isn't very bright; or c) is being paid.
Downmod all you want, but somebody has to call BS on this.
I've actually had the "opposite" problem. Ever since Win10 came out, my Win7 machine doesn't bother announcing when updates are available. I have to remember to install them myself ever "patch Tuesday".
But I repeat: this is madness. What kind of a psycho update mechanism would try to install an new OS behind your back?
I also had this issue until I sat down and figured out how to make Windows Update stop forcing Windows 10 on me. Basically, you need to remove KB3035583, hide it from updates AND uncheck the box to "give me recommended updates the same way I receive important updates". Otherwise, it would keep coming back.
This latest patch Tuesday also introduced another "update" to trigger Win10 installation, it's called: upgrade to Windows 10 Pro, version 1511, 10586
Hiding that in Windows Update got me back to installing the normal updates.
Microsoft is making this whole process way too painful for those of us who know we don't want to update.
Basically, the way they're going, it's only a matter of time before Win 7 & 8 basically don't work anymore.
I've "hidden" KB3035583 half a dozen times in the last year (even posting here about how ridiculous this all was and being promptly flamed to ashes). It always comes back eventually.
I'm pretty sure even an update changed from recommended to important will stay hidden too. Though, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that can be overridden.
At least Windows Update makes it obvious when it (Windows 10 installer) returns in some form.
EDIT: clarified last line.
Eventually they'll just start obfuscating what an update does on the website as well, if not lying outright.
There's no grand conspiracy here. Put the tinfoil hat away...
When I'm lied to about updating, and it takes bloody forever normally, it pisses me off. When you start trying to hijack my machine for your purposes "for Win10", you can collectively fuck off.
I'll set on my Windows Machine (yes singular, all others are Linux variants) for No-update Windows 7. And I'll also switch everyone I know to no-update as well.
I don't know which, and don't really care. Either way, there's a case to be made for disabling updates entirely.
I've had no problems performing Windows 10 clean installs on several machines, but have been far too skeptical to believe Microsoft could pull off a mass upgrade of the Windows 7/8 installed base.
I wonder what upgrade failure rate they deemed acceptable during their deployment testing?
I think it's an issue of trust.
On the one hand, Microsoft have taken some positive steps - making meaningful OSS contributions, following standards in Edge, making sensible statements about crypto etc.
On the other hand, Microsoft have an atrocious track record of corporate citizenship, typified by the Halloween memos. While they have been making progress, they are still a long way from perfect. Even if their current actions were beyond reproach, rebuilding trust takes time.
I think some people on HN want to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt, while others think it's just the same old bullshit under a new coat of paint. Personally, I think we should take each issue on merit. Praise where praise is due and criticise where criticism is due.
I know that her Windows 10 experience will be better than her terrible Windows 8 experience, but this seems clearly to be a maneuver to minimize the Software Support Reserve line on the Income Statement.
I'm all for upgrading users from a crappy Windows 8 to a nice Windows 10. That said, my wife is a reasonably sophisticated user and she didn't notice any significant notification before her computer was upgraded.
[... And, when I talked with her about the upgrade, she mentioned that she was now getting toolbar pop-ups asking her "How likely are you to recommend Windows to a friend?" WTF.]
I have a friend who made a slipstream installer of XP that was the barebones base installer... plus 696 network drivers. I think it was 696, may have been 676. He'd found a package of "every XP network driver ever". Anyway, "This iso will install XP that can get you connected to download everything else..." made for a very useful bit of kit.
Desktop Linux works fine for regular people. They aren't going to go digging in the terminal to brick their own computer. Show them the software center and that their app store uses things online called apt links and anyone with a smartphone understands it fine.
An "open and go" computer that fits her needs (and reduces the tech support calls to me)
Sometime in the last couple years Microsoft has realized how important online discussion is to a company's reputation and has begun an aggressive campaign of let's call it "community outreach".
Unfortunately though it appears to me to be astro turfing, the admins here and elsewhere seem to believe it to be legitimate, so whatever techniques they're using are sophisticated.
Count me (shockingly) in the pro Microsoft group here. After years and years of supporting family PCs, I understand and appreciate what they're trying to do.
If you make updating something the user has to do, they'll never do it.
If you prompt them to update, they'll never do it. Even if they've had the why of it explained to them many, many times.
In anticipation of the inevitable "well this update famously broke X": yes, the risk of an update doing something funky outweighs the risk of running software with known and possibly currently exploited vulnerabilities.
Microsoft could have started really small with this, even updating a single app. There is no non-marketing reason to simultaneously change massive amounts of software. And since it is now clear that parts of Windows 10 really are half-baked (like duplicate settings panels), there are clearly some things that should have waited for a later update, once there was time to finish them.
And you know, Microsoft has made billions and billions from software so frankly they do not get to screw around here. Nobody with that much money and that many engineers should get an ounce of sympathy for being so incompetent. They needed to start by doing a lot less, with a lot more care and attention.
I spent about 3 hours this week doing tech support for my mom over the phone because of Windows 10's aggressive upgrading behaviour.
I told her to keep her the best way to keep safe security wise is to make sure the os/browser is up to date, and because Windows 10 keeps asking to upgrade, she went ahead and did so. After upgrading to Windows 10, all network access (wired and wifi) stopped working completely. The worst part of this is that if you can't get internet, you can't even download new drivers to try and debug the problem. We tried a few things, and eventually just did a system restore back to Windows 8, but unfortunately, the system restore didn't work completely and there was more mucking around to try and get the computer into a bootable state. Then, last night, she said the heard the fan making a lot of noise, and looked down to see that Windows had gone ahead and started installing Windows 10 again. Fortunately, wired network access works now, but wifi is still broken. Hopefully Windows will push an update that fixes the wifi access soon.
Also, there seems to be a number of people here commenting very strongly in favour of Microsoft, which I find very surprising. Perhaps people from MS trying to do damage control? Some people have doubted that Windows is doing this automatically, but during the above debacle, my mother actually spent time to make sure that 'Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them' was selected. She even sent me a screenshot asking if this would prevent Windows 10 from installing. A few hours later she had Windows 10 again.