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posted by martyb on Sunday January 10 2016, @01:10AM   Printer-friendly
from the PSA dept.

If you're using a PC running Windows 7 or 8, you may be getting a little sick of endless popup screens telling you to upgrade to version 10. And you may be worried about inadvertently installing the upgrade as part of a security update.

Microsoft will start pushing out a Windows 10 upgrade as a recommended, virtually mandatory, update very soon (it's right now only an optional download). Some people are tempted to turn off Windows Update completely to avoid getting the new operating system – don't. It'll leave your computer vulnerable to attack as you'll no longer get security patches.

It's actually rather easy to turn off the Windows 10 upgrade function without losing vital regular software updates. Microsoft even has an official document [*] explaining how to do it.

[...] Make sure you follow all the steps, but essentially you have to:

        1. Open the Registry Editor (search for regedit in the Start Menu and run it).
        2. Set [DWORD value] DisableOSUpgrade to 1 in HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate
        3. Set [DWORD value] ReservationsAllowed to 0 in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\OSUpgrade

Or, the obligatory recommendation to run FOSS instead.

[*] Javascript required.


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Some call me Tim on Sunday January 10 2016, @06:04AM

    by Some call me Tim (5819) on Sunday January 10 2016, @06:04AM (#287518)

    You probably know this but the Win10 upgrade can be rolled back (within 30 days) to Win7 or 8.1 if that's what you started with. http://www.howtogeek.com/220723/how-to-uninstall-windows-10-and-downgrade-to-windows-7-or-8.1/?PageSpeed=noscript/ [howtogeek.com]

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 10 2016, @09:58PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 10 2016, @09:58PM (#287815)

    Yes, WHAT THE FUCK is up with that?

    There is ABSOLUTELY NO technical reason why the roll-back should be time-limited!

    I've reinstalled a friends laptop this weekend, she wanted to try W10 and was told she could revert if she didn't like it. It was randomly installing a broken GPU driver every few days, necessitating a reboot to safe mode to manually reverse. They didn't bother storing system restore checkpoints (why did they build that damn broken system if they don't enable it by default anyway). Of course, the "upgrade" was just over a month ago, so no option to revert.

    I did ask her if they bought her diner and a movie first.

    For now, I'm perfectly happy with by PIRATED version of W7 with updates completely disabled (a proper browser, some common sense and a virtual machine is all I need). It runs for months without rebooting, never once fucked me over with updates, and it doesn't try to blackmail me into "upgrading".