If you wanted to take advantage of the free upgrade to Windows 10…today is the last day to do it (July 29th 2016).
Here is where you can force it to start:
For many administrators this will be the end of the nightmare, and if you want to get it for free..You must get it today or you will have to pull out your wallet to get Windows 10.
It has been a rough road with this free upgrade. Microsoft has tried every trick in the book to get you to upgrade. Their last change to the upgrade notification was disgraceful. It used dark patterns you see from peddlers of adware.
For example, a Windows 10 upgrade notification would pop up on your machine – and if you did not read very carefully it was designed to upgrade unless you said no. This means if you just closed the upgrade notification window you would wake up the next day with Win 10 on your machine.
I am not sure if notifications will go away after this, so instead of the registry change I recommended earlier – the GWX Control panel is a great tool to remove it all. The site looks a little sketchy, but I have checked it over and over and it is virus and spyware free. Here is where you can get it:
http://ultimateoutsider.com/downloads/
If you still want to do this by hand in the registry, here is my previous article on the issue:
Remove the Windows 10 upgrade nag message
It was especially frustrating for us as we have machines for testing that we want to keep at their version. Windows 7 needs to stay Windows 7 – so we can test our products on Windows 7…not 10! We have a machine for that, don’t need 5 more 😉
I am not sure if the notifications to upgrade will go away, they might still be there but with a prompt for your credit card. No info from MS yet as to what will happen on August 1st.
I will be happy this is over – as the family computer guy I think about 80 percent of the Win 10 upgrades happened by accident. And most people are perplexed when they suddenly have this totally new interface – it seemed broken to them.
Now with all of that said. I love Windows 10. I just don’t want it to be forced on me or others when it is not wanted. It boots faster, runs better on older machines. I have even found that old apps that performed poorly on Windows 7 work perfect on 10. One example is my father has an old version of quickbooks that had all kinds of weird quirks under 7. It would take 10 minutes to load…it would just pause at the startup screen for no reason.
We intentionally upgraded him, and Quickbooks now works like a charm. So on the other side of the coin, if you are ready for it – start that free upgrade now or it will cost you later.
I know it has been quite a while since I have posted. So if you have no idea why you are getting this…it is a newsletter with tips for windows users. If you are a regular reader I am going to start getting back to the once a week updates.
The reason for the lack of posts is we have been working very hard to get the new versions of our software out. Remote Control with file transfers, and a new version of Network Administrator that has an agent so file and printer sharing is no longer used to do most of its work..which ms has been locking down more and more with each patch and release of Windows.
Many delays have happened since we have been forced to drop everything and address issues introduced changes in patches that broke things like keyboard support in our remote control products. Just one small example.
Soon there will be a major update to Win 10. It is called the anniversary update. Hopefully there are no breaking changes in that release.
And finally, if you don’t want to be on this list please…please let us know instead of marking as spam. We will take you off right away. Every address costs us $$ so we never want to send to someone who is not interested.
I hope your summer is going well, and to the other hemisphere (Australia, New Zealand and everyone else on that side of the world) Hope your winter is not too bad.
Thanks for reading, and new tips are in the queue for the coming weeks.
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