This has nothing to do with whether you should run Windows on your PC or other device. I’m sharing these two items so that you’ll be aware and take appropriate action to maintain control over your computer, instead of letting someone else make all the important decisions for you.
1. Win10 Upgrade Becomes “Recommended Update” Next Year — In essence, you will have to fight to avoid an automated upgrade from Win7/8 to Win10. What happens is that MS moves the upgrade to the list of “Recommended Updates.” Virtually everyone I know has their computer set to automatically accept this class of update. If you don’t, you’ll get lots of complaints from Windows about reduced security and all that jazz. This crosses a thin line because they know this means the vast majority of folks running some other version of Windows can be hoodwinked into taking the upgrade. They claim you’ll have to choose to continue once the process starts, but I have to wonder if it will be obvious to most users, having been long conditioned to go along with everything that pops up like that.
At any rate, the remedy is to examine the settings for system updates in your Control Panel. For Win7, here is a good run-down. Please note the second image where you see a checkmark in the box “Give me recommended updates the same way I receive important updates” and uncheck that box. Now be ready every Patch Tuesday to have to pick through the recommended updates. (See what I mean about making it hard to say “No”?)
2. Win10 Abuses Your Bandwidth — It’s pretty cool when, on your office or corporate LAN, only one system has to download the updates from MS for your Win10 computers. The first one to get them will share those updates with all the others. I suppose that was the excuse, but what happens is that MS is using your bandwidth on the Internet itself, not on just your local network. Literally: Your Win10 computer is being used to save MS money by a default setting that makes your computer join a sort of torrent network and upload your updates to other computers randomly scattered around your region of the world. The link tells you how to fix this.
Thanks for this article, it was very informative. I’ve just updated to Win 10, literally 2 days ago, and although it seems to be better than Win 8 on a design level, I have yet to have had the time to explore what’s under the hood. Of course, Win 8 became unstable, and I didn’t like it anyway, so I decided to upgrade to Win 10 instead of reloading Win 8. To be honest, when I bought this laptop with preloaded windows, if it didn’t have a touchscreen I would have probably wiped the drive and loaded win 7 onto it. I also have a computer running Win 7, so I appreciate the timing of this article as I would like to keep that system going as it remain stable, so I’ll definitely take your advice and change the update status. Thanks!
Thanks for the kind words, Emily. One of the most important things I do is enable others to find ways to exploit every detail of life to glorify God. Computer technology looms rather large on this blog.