JorgeA

I suspect that, free or not, the nags will continue forever. Do you mean, even if W10 will becomes a paid-upgrade, the nags will continue? Windows installs automatically and then asks immediately for a credit-card or it deactivates itself. That's so crazy, it would fit NuMicrosoft perfectly. Sure, why not. Once Win10 were installed, you'd be given 30 days to either send payment or roll back to Win7. If you didn't do either one, Windows would start rebooting automatically every 2 hours, like the Win8 preview versions did. This arrangement would create maximum inconvenience for the user, and so would be more likely to get them to stay on Win10 (and pay up). At this point, nothing from Microsoft would surprise me. --JorgeA

I suspect that, free or not, the nags will continue forever. And if you hide the notification, it will magically reappear just like so many other updates have been lately. The official reason for their popping back up seems to be that some change was made to the update, so that technically it's no longer "the same" file. Well, since we're told that Win10 will be an ongoing project, it will never be finished and it will always be changing -- and so Win7 users will always keep getting "invited" to download it no matter how many times they hide it. --JorgeA

@Formfiller, you beat me to it! I was going to post the following: Microsoft to users: You'll download Windows 10, and you'll like it I dunno about this move. Millions of users have been taught to trust Mother Microsoft and to just download everything it sends down the pipe. How many people will be in the middle of a project, decide to pause to "do Windows Updates," click-click-click OK-OK-OK -- and all of a sudden realize they're in an alien environment and the program they were using for their project is gone? BTW I wonder if that "accidental" downloading of Win10 to untold numbers of people a couple of weeks ago was actually a test to gauge the feasibility and/or public reaction to clogging up people's computers and bandwidth with Win10 bits. --JorgeA

You're welcome! One of the things I like about it, is precisely that it doesn't use the Ribbon interface. --JorgeA

Paul Thurrott speaks out against ads in Windows 10. Discussion starts at 1:10:04. My transcription: --JorgeA

The best (IMO) alternative to MS Office is available for free today (and probably for a couple more days) from SharewareOnSale at: http://sharewareonsale.com/s/softmaker-office-giveaway-coupon-sale. Enjoy! --JorgeA

Cool, thanks! About the last line: that's an example of what Steve Gibson calls "the tyranny of the default." The developer counts on the fact that most people will either not know, or not care, or not care enough to change the default settings. This is OK if the defaults are benign, but not if they are not. --JorgeA

Here's another Win10 privacy and telemetry control tool. Ongoing discussion in the creator's forum here. For those who have used other utilities to tame Win10's spying and chattiness -- how does this one compare? Meanwhile, here's the paternalistic attitude Microsoft takes about the whole thing: Microsoft doesn't see Windows 10's mandatory data collection as a privacy risk It's attitudes like that which make tools like Spybot Anti-Beacon necessary. But there is cause for hope from Redmond: --JorgeA

So, we see that Windows still can't make sense of Apple or Linux file systems. Three months into the "launch" of Windows 10, and the cake is not fully baked even today. If this had happened with XP or 7, customers and the tech press would have been all over Microsoft for its incompetence. It did happen with Vista. But now with 10, Microsoft has spun public perceptions to get us us believe it's a perpetual "work in progress" so we have no reason, at any point in the process, to complain about its unfinished condition. Hopefully someone more technical will be able to handle that. LOL I'm tempted to say, "Welcome to Windows 10, the OS that's never finished and works the way we (not you) want it to." --JorgeA

Charlie Demerjian really sticks it to Microsoft and Win10 PC makers: Microsoft, Intel, Lenovo, Dell, and HP CMOs think you are an id!0t A hard-hitting critique of the consortium's new "A PC does what?" ad campaign. About touch screen capability: On Windows 10: Lotta good stuff in there. He proposes a solution for the PC market's troubles in Part II, but that's hidden behind a paywall. --JorgeA EDIT: typo!

Even more joys of cloud computing: Microsoft OneDrive is down worldwide Ah yes, the price of convenience. OneDrive files seem to be inaccessible a lot more often than are my files on my own PC... How "convenient" is it not to be able to retrieve your own files when you need them? For chrissakes, don't be so d*mn lazy and just copy them over from your PC to your laptop or whatever next time you need to open the files at an offsite meeting. Sheesh. If you can't open 'em when you need 'em because you were relying on the stupid spycloud, you get what you deserve. --JorgeA P.S. Have you noticed that Neowin has rigged things such that you can no longer highlight just the headline alone, for copy-and-pasting into a forum thread? All sorts of other unwanted stuff gets highlighted along with it, no matter which direction you approach the headline from with your mouse pointer. I had to type the above headline by hand.

Wish I knew! It's been what, a couple of years now? I did see a few posts by him more recently in a forum that was created in 2012 when the Windows 8 Deeper Impressions thread was first closed and ultimately moved from the Windows 8 subforum over to the General Discussion subforum, and some people feared that Microsoft had leaned on MSFN. IIRC his most recent postings in that other forum were from last year (?), but they were at best sporadic and short. All I can think of is that either there was some family/health issue, or else he simply got burned out. He did put in a helluva lot of work into his MSFN postings, which AFAIK were both greatly and universally appreciated. (Except for Win8 fans, I guess. ) --JorgeA

Microsoft must be getting really desperate: Upcoming Windows 10 patch begs you not to change default programs, switch browsers Guess Edge isn't doing all that well, even among the supposed trillions of delighted new converts to Windows 10. Oh, and check out the image of this tweet by Peter Bright: Peter was a big Metro fanboy when Win8 came out, to the point where @CharlotteTheHarlot nicknamed him "Not-so" Bright. But as he seems to be less enthused about Win10, he's slowly earning his last name back. The writer of the ExtremeTech post, Joel Hruska, says: --JorgeA

can't open the site That's odd, it opens fine here. Just tried it again. Maybe you already downloaded some "telemetry" updates and now Windows won't let you access pro-privacy sites. --JorgeA

This Win10 privacy website was down the last time I checked, but now it seems to be back up. They also have a page for Windows 7 and 8.1, mostly for the purpose of removing telemetry and Win10-related updates. --JorgeA

Could be. OTOH, we know that when Windows 8 came out there was a concerted "astroturfing" effort to talk up that OS with paid shills in the comments sections of various tech news sites. I wouldn't rule out that possibility in this case. Some people, when they're caught, learn not to do the offending behavior. Others learn to do it more covertly. --JorgeA

Is Windows 10 a way to deliver ads to users? An adman seems to think so: Windows 10 is a great platform for advertising --JorgeA

--JorgeA

Dedoimedo tries out Win10 on a tablet: HP Stream 7 - To Windows 10 and back Here are some of his (printable ) observations. Bear in mind throughout that this is on a touch-enabled (even a touch-only) device. Hmm, I thought that Win10 was suppossed to deliver a uniform experience across device types, and that's what they wrecked the desktop experience for. Choice quotables: --JorgeA

Backlash grows over Microsoft's Eternal Patch Tuesday plan The comments are generally scathing, but check out this one: Are they serious?? --JorgeA

^^ --JorgeA

Microsoft Windows veteran Joe Belfiore takes a year leave-of-absence My first thought was that he wants to create some distance between his cheerleading for Windows 10 and the looming disaster that it represents. OTOH we've probably all heard of radio DJs who go "on vacation" and then never come back on the air. Here's what Mary Jo has to say: --JorgeA

At least you're getting some kind of MSFN notification by e-mail. It's been months since I've gotten any. --JorgeA I'm having the same problem too. Email notifications worked for me until July 20, when I received the last one. I tried to redo my email settings, but never got the confirmation emails to finish registering my email address. I'm currently on here with a disposable email address. My email provider is GMX, and they are giving me by far the best service I've had from an email provider. I've had issues with Yahoo and Outlook, and don't trust Google. I've private messaged xper several times with no response. Quite frustrating. Try posting the problem here. The e-mail problems all seem to have started with the most recent update to the forum software. --JorgeA

Windows 10: Extensions for Edge to arrive with Redstone in 2016 Another stunning Microsoft success that builds confidence (not!) in the company's ability to deliver. --JorgeA

More joys of cloud computing: I Don't Trust OneDrive After What Happened Today More horror stories further down: Yep, we should all ditch our desktop PCs and switch to 32GB smartphones. --JorgeA