Everyone here knows I'm a PC user. While I've never been a die-hard Microsoft fanatic, I've just like Windows and I know how to use it to get what I want done. I also think that in the last couple of years, since Nadella took over, Microsoft has been headed in the right direction and has been doing some really great things, making decisions that are good for their own business and good for users too...

...But they're f***ing up this Windows 10 thing...

So apparently MS decided to switch from the carrot to the stick, and the new policy is to force the Windows 10 upgrade on their users. At some point, my clients are coming back to their computers and they've been upgraded. Even my own desktop got this upgrade recently. I had a little bit of warning from a dialog box, but where it usually let me X out and tell it not to upgrade, this time the notification was more like "oh, you're getting this upgrade, and all you can choose is when in the next 12 hours it happens." The next morning I came back to my computer and I had Windows 10.

Now, I actually don't have that much against Windows 10. It's leaps and bounds better than 8, but I liked 7 better. I'm also not a fan of the forced upgrades and the fact that I have no control over whether I receive future "enhancements" to the OS. So the next time Microsoft releases a "Windows 8-like" update, I'll have no choice but to receive it. But in general it's fine.

I'm pissed because this is causing problems. I know that I have some clients who got the update but aren't calling me because everything is fine, but I've gotten calls from others who are having problems. Most of them are driver issues, but some are more severe.

Example: lets say you're a 70 year old woman whose Windows 7 computer was set up for her 5-7 years ago. At that point she asked whoever set it up (wasn't me) to make it so her computer boots to the desktop. Well, to do that you have to set a password and then edit the user account to auto login (pretty sure the password can't be blank for this to work). Well, after the Windows 10 upgrade this person booted up and was presented with a password box. She didn't know what it was, and now she's stuck. She had no password reset disk, and Windows 10 gives you almost no options for how to proceed. In the end, I used a password recovery program to reset her password to blank and was able to get in and set a new one.

I know this is a single case, and that there were problems created by the user, but hey, she'd been using the computer just fine for six years until MS decided to force this update on her for her own good.

And why? Because they're going to start charging for it in July? Why would they even do that? If they're so obsessed with getting people to hop on board that they'd force it, why give a deadline at all? I know it's an incentive that'll get more people to upgrade, but everyone is already getting bombarded with reminders to upgrade, so it's not like people can forget about it.

Up until now, my advice to my customers had been something like "hey, Windows 10 isn't bad, but if everything is running well for you and you don't want to rock the boat, Windows 7 will be supported until 2020, at which point you'll probably want a new computer anyway, so just hold off." But now I need to find a way to give them the option of blocking this forced update, and I can't find much info online about this... Anyone know?

Sorry for the rant. This move really ticked me off. I was one of the people who thought the U2 iTunes thing was a dumb move, and this is a few orders of magnitude greater than that.