Coyote Blog

We all have learned to live with the constant Windows 10 upgrade boxes, but the Microsoft upgrade campaign is becoming more insidious.  Last week I got a message on my home (windows 7) computer that I as going to be upgraded in 3-4 days.  For a while, I thought I had accidentally given them permission, but it turns out that MS is now upgrading computers to Windows 10 without permission.   Only if you note the text of this email and explicitly stop it can you prevent the "upgrade" from occurring.   From PC World:

Reports of unwanted Windows 10 upgrades have been circulating for the past few days on Reddit and Twitter, after the last Patch Tuesday. These users say they never approved or initiated the upgrade, and were dragged away from their Windows 7 (or perhaps Windows 8) installs anyway.

This is all part of Microsoft’s plan, of course. Last October, the company announced that it would reclassify Windows 10 as a “Recommended” update from older versions starting in early 2016, at which point many more users would get the upgrade without explicit permission. That reclassification began on February 1, and auto-upgrades have been rolling out ever since. If complaints are reaching a higher volume now, perhaps it’s because the rollout is getting more aggressive.

Here’s what the Recommended update looks like, according to ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley: First, users will receive a notification saying their PCs are scheduled to receive Windows 10 in the next three or four days. Users can click a small link to cancel or postpone the update, but simply closing the window will cause the notification to appear again one hour before the scheduled update time. If users don’t cancel or postpone within that timeframe, the update will begin automatically.