Updategate: is it finally the end?

If, like we do, you monitor how Windows 10 "free upgrade" is pushed on existing systems (Windows 7 and Windows 8 PCs), you may have noticed lately that the ergonomics seems to have changed.

First we got a countdown dialog when clicking on the "Get Windows Update" icon:

And if we clicked the "Decline free offer", we got this dialog:

Does "decline free offer" do what Win10wiwi and other "anti "Windows 10  Upgrade" do?

We tried it and... No, the "get Windows 10 icon"

  is still in the status bar, even after we rebooted.

What's more, a new recent updated version of KB3035583 (actually deployed with 2016 07 19 batch of updates) added a very "nice" screen that takes ALL the display, that can't be closed the usual ways (no "x" to close the window, even alt-tab can't be used to display anything else but this screen or the desktop). Here is a screen capture of what we saw:

Fortunately, if you click "Do not notify me again", this blue screen disappears. 

And actually, we checked what these "Do not notify me again" and "Decline the free offer" do at the OS level. They do SOME of the things that win10wiwi does. But not all of them.

The components involved in the "upgrade to Windows 10 / GWX" ecosystem stay installed, some of them are still working in the background. The scheduled tasks are still there too.

Now the good thing for the user is that it seems that finally, after almost one year, Microsoft has made it possible to say "no" to the free upgrade to Windows 10. Even if it is not perfect at all and if the related components may still take some resources even after you said "No", it is better than what they previously did.

Users that are concerned by their control over their Windows 7 and Windows 8 system can still use Win10wiwi to totally uninstall the "Get Windows 10" components and thus prevent them from taking any resource.

Note that even if you ran Win10wiwi in the past, some newer versions of the same components may sneak into your system. But running Win10wiwi again will remove them. Again...

And if I want Windows 10 after all?

If you want to accept the free offer to upgrade to Windows 10 but you can't, Win10wiwi may help too: in its expert mode, it has the option to set everything so that the upgrade to Windows 10 will be enabled after a reboot and a "check for updates" in Windows Update.  

What will happen after July 29?

Who knows? Microsoft seems to be eager to have as many people as possible switching to Windows 10. I would not be surprised if they extended their free offer one way or another...

Sometimes I wish I was more litigious...

It may be my last article about Windows 10 "updategate" and I can't end it without mentioning this recent news that a California woman was awarded $10,000 for borked Windows 10 upgrade.

While I am happy for her, I also must admit that she certainly made a lot more money and spent fewer hours on this "updategate" than we did. Actually, we lost money with Win10wiwi: it is a time consuming mission to develop, support such a toll and then, on each "patch Tuesday", inspect every Windows Update component that gets deployed to Windows 7 and Windows 8 devices...

Now, we may have helped quite a number of people (more than 57,000 PCs have been patched with Win10wiwi so far) and, ironically, we may have saved Microsoft quite a lot of money for our users have no reasons to sue MS for a PC borked after a tentative to updated to Windows 10, since it will not try to upgrade! 

If you want to support us, you can donate or click an ad on our dedicated page.

(but we won't get $10,000 unless there are more than 25,000 clicks on some ad!)