Microsoft has been criticised over its Windows 10 software by consumer rights group Which?.
The body said it had received hundreds of complaints about the upgrade, including lost files, emails no longer syncing and broken wi-fi and printing.
In some cases, it said, users had had to pay for their computer to be repaired.
Microsoft defended its software and highlighted that it provided help online and by phone.
"The Windows 10 upgrade is a choice designed to help people take advantage of the most secure and most productive Windows," said a spokesman.
"Customers have distinct options. Should a customer need help with the upgrade experience, we have numerous options including free customer support."
Which? surveyed more than 5,500 of its members in June, and said that 12% of the 2,500 who had upgraded to Windows 10 had later reverted to an earlier version.
It's not a surprise to anyone on Soylent, but this is the sort of thing that causes conventional wisdom to shift.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Friday September 23 2016, @01:08PM
I don't understand why an OS upgrade should be touching any files on a user's Desktop or Documents or really any User folder.
I find it hard to believe that even MS would delete people's files (BBC/Which? report tells of "lost files"). More likely that paths have been broken, or new versions of apps fail to recognise the previous file formats.
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Friday September 23 2016, @01:19PM
This happened to one my end lusers who lost her Desktop files. Her User folder was only her first name, so there wasn't anything odd about her pre-upgrade environment in that regard.
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(Score: 2) by dry on Saturday September 24 2016, @04:43AM
This is MS we're talking about. I remember installing Win95 (the first edition, no Explorer) on a system with OS/2. The install went well, didn't even complain when instead of entering the product code, I just hit enter. At the end of the install, Windows announced that a previous operating system was detected and removed. No warning or anything.
Now I was smart enough to fire up fdisk, see that all previous partitions were still there and set Bootmanager as the active partition and reboot into a multiboot environment.
Same when I installed Win98. When I installed Win2k (service pack 2), it was nice enough to tell me how to set Bootmanager as the active partition. Earlier Win2k supposedly overwrote the Bootmanager partition.