WINDOWS 10 FREE UPGRADE!!!!???

Image your machine first. Plenty of free open source tools out there to use.

Then try the upgrade.

Worst case, you put the image back and you've just wasted some time.

 

I foresee Microsoft charging a subscription plan to the operating system.. Just like they do office 365

 

They may try. That'll go over even less well than the forced Metrofication of release 8.

Meaning, it'll be quickly rolled back as all the users lose their shit, a bunch of billionaires will change 'jobs' and MS will go through another 'paradigm shift'.

They only get away with charging for Office 'cause it's mandated by corporate use, so that's what they buy for at home. It doesn't matter you could use OpenOffice or LibreOffice at home for free and do the same thing. That's....like...hard and stuff.

If they try subbing the entire OS, they'll explode their own hold on the OS market. No way that shit'll fly for long.

 

Not a bad idea....I'll create an image and will probably wait a little while to see how smooth it really is from other reports. I am still strong in the "if it aint broke, dont fix it camp), but I do like upgrades to kinda liven up the user experience.

 

Imaging is so easy and simple nowadays it isn't even funny. I image the C drive on my gaming rig at home once a month or so just because. Takes about 20 minutes.

If I ever hit the shit or explode something in the OS or whatever, I'm 30 minutes from "meh, back to it" right where I was. I save all my actual data on other redundant drives so C is really nothing much. Plus that it's on an SSD its intentionally a small set of files and fast as a scalded dog to transfer.

 

This is my dilemma as well.

 

I wonder if Windows 10 will accept my copy of Microsoft Office 2007........wouldn't be the least bit surprised to learn that you need to subscribe to Microsoft Office 365 and gets hosed with an annual fee.

 

if that happens, i'll be installing 7 back or switching to ubuntu linux

 

I'm doing it. My laptop might not be running the greatest these days, but I am going to give it a go. At the worst, my laptop goes tits up and I have to get a new one

 

Here's my plan

Laptop and desktop (gaming) will be updated to 10. Both are do for reformats anyways so be the perfect time. If I don't like it then just a simple reformat again.

My two htpcs will more than likely stay as Windows 7. I still use Windows media center for live tv.

 

My OS always has free upgrades

 

Control panel -> Programs and Features -> View Installed Updates -> Search Installed Updates (upper right hand corner) -> Type KB3035583 -> Right-click -> Uninstall

Far simpler and less risk of damage than any registry hack. You're literally trying to make a mountain out of a molehill.

 

Apple moved to free OS X version updates not to long ago. Microsoft is following suit. It seems like this will be the last fresh version of Windows if you believe the leaks. From here on changes will be more incremental and Microsoft will focus on making there money from fresh licenses, patients, directx support, Windows phone, and the Windows store. If you believe the hype Microsoft believes the move to a free common upgraded OS will help direct the market to there phone and tablet products.

 

Not me, friend. My users.

If you're fortunate enough to have folks using IT gear under your guidance that are advanced enough, then you are far luckier than I. I'm currently with the nicest yet dumbest overall group of supported drones of anyplace I've worked in near 20 years. I honestly am not sure how some of them make it to work unsupervised every day.

 

I still fail to see how the steps I listed are in any way more difficult than a registry hack.

 

Because they're new, different, unusual things that they've never done before, and are therefore paralysed by fear and uncertainty.

I've got one lady here...advanced accounting user. She's writing custom SQL queries to to hit up several DBs and get piles of data for loan package analysis *daily*.

You get her two clicks off her 'normal way of doing things' and she's your 88 year old great-grandmother. She's afraid to click -> select a menu item she's never seen before, even when I'm on the phone telling her to do so. Anything more than a three-finger salute to change her password, I go over and do for her, as its just faster and less painful. I showed her four times how easy it is to change the default printer. She still won't on her own.

She is not unusual among the 40+ office dweller crowd. At least not in banks, law firms, etc that I've seen

 

I'll pass for now. I don't want to be talking to Apu for three hours if something goes south.

 

@Xaks , can't you just prevent the KB through group policy or windows upgrade server service (sorry if I don't have the right name of the MS thing, I'm not the sysadmin)?
@snowbrdd , I believe the registry edits are necessary because after uninstalling the update, the KB will attempt to reinstall. I don't have the article directly on hand.
To further complicate the discussion, I don't think enterprise installs of 7/8 are eligible for Win10, and are excluded from the KB.

I looked through the updates that Win10 is supposed to bring, and it's pretty much "meh" if you are already on 8.1. Anything interesting got stripped out, from what I understand. What's left:

The "meh" to "don't like it":
Cortana is not something I care about
I don't care about Windows Hello, nor do I really like having a camera on all the time. It would be fine for a phone, but that's it.
Continuum is cool, but not a desktop thing
the start menu change isn't going to affect me much unless they do a bad job at pulling it off, which I think may happen. The start button in 7 is one thing, the start screen in 8.1 is another, but trying to blend them might be a backfire.
I think they are going to do a bad job with the interface for virtual desktops. What I mean is that in *nix, virtual desktops are separate environments. In Win10, it sounds like they are treating it like 'extended screens'. For instance, Alt-tab will still tab through EVERYthing, whereas I think it should just do the active environment.

The good:
10 should be less resource intense = faster
Floppy drives no longer have native support.
Win10 Home users are forced into automatic updates. I'm hoping this forces people to keep their computers from being shitty and dragging down the rest of us. I don't have articles at the ready, but basically, older hardware and browsers mean that infrastructure and websites have to support legacy versions so that grandma can access her AOL email with IE 6 over a dialup connection. That backwards compatibility means code bloat, slower load times, on and on, dragging down the performance of even your modern browser, which has to be compatible with out of date website logic as well.
The Edge browser is promising. If it still works like it did during project Spartan, it will attempt to access websites using modern technology like HTML5. If it encounters some old nasty website, it will launch backwards compatibility, but only at that time. The result should be a browser that's not always carrying around baggage for those "just in case" moments.

 

WHAT! NO FLOPPY DRIVE SUPPORT? I'm out.

 

The down side, and this has been a HUGE thing that has kept me employed for 20 years, is that MS patches are famous for their ability to fuck up PCs in unanticipated ways. I could write you a series of novels regarding some of the more colorful and strange ways Black Tuesdays have made my life harder but my wallet fatter. This is a VERY double-edged sword. People like me won't have an issue, but we aren't the problem, and aren't the ones that raise the stick about it publicly when it hits the fan (and it will)

I can, yes, in my specific environment. But that's not the point I was trying to make. The point was more that the USER is the impediment, not the technology itself.