Today one of my regular computer ministry clients called to tell me his computer updated to Win10 without his permission. He called to ask how he could get Win7 back. Aside from going on there with a Win7 install DVD, there was nothing I could do because Win10 locked him out of the process for restoring the previous OS and won’t let him even go online. He’s calling the vendor for now to see if they’ll help him.
In any other business, this would be a criminal act. I assure you that nothing and no one is going to make Microsoft back off. They are going to ram this thing down people’s throats, and louder the complaints get, the more nasty MS acts.
Here’s what I can do for you: How to minimize the worst of MS spying on you. They have a page on how to reduce the new spying stuff recently foisted on Win7 and Win8 users, too.
I give up. If you are running Vista or earlier, I can help you. There is a group working to keep XP alive, but it will require you do some reading and make sure you understand how it works. It’s at RyanVM Forums. There is even some work on Win2K at RyanVM and here. I trust the sites; I can’t vouch for the information, but the sites are not dangerous in themselves.
For myself, I keep a WinXP virtual machine running on my Linux laptops, plus I run Wine so I can use Notepad++ and Word 2000 (grammar checking on Linux word processors is a sad joke). I’m still giving away my two free ebooks on installing and using Debian 8 (one and two). I am always willing to help you by answering questions and giving you advice on things until you become familiar and comfortable with Debian or any other type of Linux I know about.
Other than, I suspect my computer ministry is about to slow waaaaaay down.
Thanks Ed, just alerted Paul to your first paragraph and he immediately told my laptop not to accept any updates. Fingers crossed. He’ll be reading this through shortly.
Glad to help. I had read about others complaining of this unauthorized upgrade, but this is the first time I’ve had direct evidence of it.
My poor sis said OK when a window popped up and asked if she would like a free upgrade to win10 from her win8. She knew/knows no better. Her printer stopped working, files went missing…… I made the mistake of advising her to go to the ms screen from Settings > Update & security > Recovery where she could revert back to win8. Now, she is totally screwed. The downgrade made things even worse. Now she will have to return to a refresh back to original factory settings via Dell support and lose every picture, document and etc because now her files are corrupted. Oh yeah, go microsoft!
The MegaSatan Corporation….. has a ring to it. Bill is a RC now. Doug Batchelor would love it.