[Mikes]

I would like to do my free upgrade but button did not appear. And ive tried troubleshooting. Kinda pissed at Microsoft.

Why, instead of being pissed, don't you just download the upgrade tool and go ahead with the upgrade? https://www.microsoft.com/de-de/software-download/windows10

(Is the German version of the site, but finding the English equivalent should be easy enough, ... MS always rereoutes me to the local site sorry. ;-))

[Charismatic]

Whats the tool called?

[jr2]

I would like to do my free upgrade but button did not appear. And ive tried troubleshooting. Kinda pissed at Microsoft.

Microsoft has opened the floodgates for Windows 10, making the upgrade available in 190 countries around the globe. If you've already reserved the upgrade on Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1 and are yet to see the update, there's an easy fix that allows you to manually initiate the download process.

Before you begin, ensure Windows Update can download and install updates automatically. Not sure how to do that? Here's how:

Turn automatic updating on or off

• Open Windows Update by swiping in from the right edge of the screen (or, if you're using a mouse, pointing to the lower-right corner of the screen and moving the mouse pointer up), tapping or clicking Settings, tapping or clicking Change PC settings, and then tapping or clicking Update and recovery.
• Tap or click Choose how updates get installed.
• Under Important updates, choose the option that you want.
• Under Recommended updates, select the Give me recommended updates the same way I receive important updates check box.
• Under Microsoft Update, select the Give me updates for other Microsoft products when I update Windows check box, and then tap or click Apply.

Once automatic updates are enabled, launch Command Prompt in Administrator mode and enter the following command: wuauclt.exe/updatenow. That should trigger the Windows 10 download.

How to start a command prompt as an administrator:

• Click Start, click All Programs, and then click Accessories.
• Right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as administrator.
• If the User Account Control dialog box appears, confirm that the action it displays is what you want, and then click Continue.

If you're having any issues, be sure to hit up Windows Central's forums. This discussion is dedicated to force updating.

[jr2]

Whats the tool called?

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/media-creation-tool-install

[mjn.mixael]

OK, so here's my plan now. I'm going to get everything installed the way I want on Win7. I know Win10 has an uninstall option.. but I just don't trust it for some reason. I'll create a full system image and then go to 10. If things don't work after a few weeks of inevitable tweaks and changes to things.. I can just image back to 7 as if it never happened.

I did just install 10 on an older computer and poked around with it a little bit. Not a big fan of the newer UI, but that's probably because I'm just so used to Win7 UI at this point. For you Win10 users out there.. what tips and tricks do I need to learn for Win10 to be able to navigate it like a pro?

[jr2]

Win + X, then {appropriate key} :




I'll post more as I remember.

EDIT:  Screen brightness (and battery saving mode) is accessible from the battery icon, but only 25, 50, 75 and 100% -- get to the slider by right-clicking battery and then adjust screen brightness.

Not specifically Win 10, so in quotes:

I use Launchy, and have since XP (started using it on 7 cause the MS one in the start menu has too much of a delay) -- just don't set they key shortcut to something reserved, I know Winkey + Esc works great (and only need one hand to pull it up).  I also use the built in Spotlight Wide skin, set it to hide on loss of focus, and decrease the opacity of the window to about 75%.  I also install Everything -- those two are the first things I install on any Windows box (ok, Launchy can has Linux & Mac too).  Basically, Launchy lets me run any program with a few key strokes (the search is that fast), and Everything lets me find any file I know part of the name of (and search in a folder) just as fast.

[jr2]

https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/6815/microsoft-will-now-let-windows-10-upgraders-use-windows-7-8-or-8-1-product-key-to-activate

http://reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/3oiq50/microsoft_will_now_let_windows_10_upgraders_use/

[mjn.mixael]

https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/6815/microsoft-will-now-let-windows-10-upgraders-use-windows-7-8-or-8-1-product-key-to-activate

http://reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/3oiq50/microsoft_will_now_let_windows_10_upgraders_use/

I saw that. Crazy that it took them this long to do it.

[Klaustrophobia]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/11/02/microsoft-confirms-unstoppable-windows-10-tracking/?utm_campaign=yahootix&partner=yahootix&ref=yfp

I've decided windows 10 will never, EVER touch my computer.  If that means I eventually have to find and install one of the old XP or Vista copies I have lying around, so be it.  Hell, I might even consider a Mac.  I refuse to accept microsoft's attempts to take advantage of the common user, and do their best to force even the savvy ones into accepting their spyware.

Well, except for any automatic downloading it does before I figure out how to stop it I guess.  Already killed the GWX process, hopefully that's enough for now.  I wonder if there's a Microsoft filter list for PeerBlock yet.

[Dragon]

Not updating to Win 10 won't save you, I'm afraid. Better start looking for those XP, since they're going to patch in this "feature" into 7 and 8 too:
http://winaero.com/blog/telemetry-and-data-collection-are-coming-to-windows-7-and-windows-8-too/

That said, well, we're going to see how unstoppable it is... Last time it took me half an hour to knock all this crap out. It seems to be staying disabled. I have better ways of using my bandwidth than uploading diagnostics to them. If MS forces tracking despite all the settings telling it not to, people will soon invent a way to kill it. Windows isn't Linux, but the Pro version still can be extensively fiddled with, and that's not counting 3rd party hacks. So far, it seems that group policy+registry hack fixed it. If it stops working, I guess I'll see if COMODO can be used to firewall every transmission to MS telemetry servers.

I noticed that most complaints come from the "Home" version of Win 10, in which those things might genuinely be hard to turn off. On Pro and Enterprise, it's a matter of knowing were to look. I suppose MS can afford to piss off individual users with tracking and forced updates, but not companies that buy the OS in bulk.

[karajorma]

Sounds like it's almost time to alter the hosts file to block microsoft.com.

[Dragon]

They predicted that already, they won't let you do that (the spoilsports). I read about that, apparently you're not the first one to think about it. Bloody thing is hardcoded as allowed. But the premise is sound, even though you need a 3rd part firewall for that.

[MP-Ryan]

They predicted that already, they won't let you do that (the spoilsports). I read about that, apparently you're not the first one to think about it. Bloody thing is hardcoded as allowed. But the premise is sound, even though you need a 3rd part firewall for that.

Sounds like it's almost time to alter the hosts file to block microsoft.com.

Any half-decent quality router will be able to take care of this.

That said, if I can turn off everything but anonymized usage statistics, I probably won't bother.

[Klaustrophobia]

"anonymized"

[jr2]

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/even-when-told-not-to-windows-10-just-cant-stop-talking-to-microsoft/

by Peter Bright - Aug 12, 2015 11:34pm EDT

Windows 10 uses the Internet a lot to support many of its features. The operating system also sports numerous knobs to twiddle that are supposed to disable most of these features and the potentially privacy-compromising connections that go with them.

Unfortunately for privacy advocates, these controls don't appear to be sufficient to completely prevent the operating system from going online and communicating with Microsoft's servers.

For example, even with Cortana and searching the Web from the Start menu disabled, opening Start and typing will send a request to www.bing.com to request a file called threshold.appcache which appears to contain some Cortana information, even though Cortana is disabled. The request for this file appears to contain a random machine ID that persists across reboots.


Shown in the Fiddler debugging Web proxy, the request that the Start menu makes every time you start typing into it or boot your machine.

Some of the traffic is obviously harmless. On connecting to a new network, Windows machines try to request two URLs (www.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt and ipv6.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt, the former over IPv4, the latter over IPv6) to ascertain whether a given network is routed to the Internet and if there is a captive portal in the way (NCSI stands for "Network Connection Status Indicator"). These requests are very bare, with no machine IDs or other data sent. If you want to turn even these off there is a way to do so, but the privacy impact is minimal.

Some of the traffic looks harmless but feels like it shouldn't be happening. For example, even with no Live tiles pinned to Start (and hence no obvious need to poll for new tile data), Windows 10 seems to download new tile info from MSN's network from time to time, using unencrypted HTTP to do so. While again the requests contain no identifying information, it's not clear why they're occurring at all, given that they have no corresponding tile.

Other traffic looks a little more troublesome. Windows 10 will periodically send data to a Microsoft server named ssw.live.com. This server seems to be used for OneDrive and some other Microsoft services. Windows 10 seems to transmit information to the server even when OneDrive is disabled and logins are using a local account that isn't connected to a Microsoft Account. The exact nature of the information being sent isn't clear—it appears to be referencing telemetry settings—and again, it's not clear why any data is being sent at all. We disabled telemetry on our test machine using group policies.


We have no idea what's going on here.

And finally, some traffic seems quite impenetrable. We configured our test virtual machine to use an HTTP and HTTPS proxy (both as a user-level proxy and a system-wide proxy) so that we could more easily monitor its traffic, but Windows 10 seems to make requests to a content delivery network that bypass the proxy.

We've asked Microsoft if there is any way to disable this additional communication or information about what its purpose is. We were told "As part of delivering Windows 10 as a service, updates may be delivered to provide ongoing new features to Bing search, such as new visual layouts, styles and search code. No query or search usage data is sent to Microsoft, in accordance with the customer's chosen privacy settings. This also applies to searching offline for items such as apps, files and settings on the device." This is consistent with what we saw (there is no query or search data transmitted), but also likely to run counter to most people's expectations; if Web searching and Cortana are disabled, we suspect that the inference that most people would make is that searching the Start menu wouldn't hit the Internet at all. But it does. The traffic could be innocuous, but the inclusion of a machine ID gives it a suspicious appearance.

We've argued recently that operating systems will continue to make privacy-functionality trade-offs. For many users, perhaps even the majority, these trade-offs will be worthwhile; services such as Cortana (Siri, Google Now), cloud syncing of files, passwords, and settings, and many other modern operating system features are all valuable, and many will feel that the loss of privacy is an acceptable price to pay. But the flip side of this is that disabling these services for those who don't want to use them should really disable them. And it's not at all clear that Windows 10 is doing that right now.

EDIT:  And I've already posted this in this thread, I believe:  What Windows 10's "Privacy Nightmare" Settings Actually Do

[MP-Ryan]

So, I just completed my hardware upgrade and horrendously awful accompanying OS reinstall upgrade (7. Upgrade to 10. Clea install 10. Cry), and I have to say...

I really, REALLY like Windows 10.

Also, my system boots to login screen in about 6 seconds.

[Dragon]

Yup, say what you will about the tracking, but it's fast. Back when I used Windows 7 it took forever to boot, now it's pretty speedy, despite the rig being exactly the same. Not 6 seconds, but definitely less than a minute. I used to start this thing up in the morning and go do something else for a while, then go back, log in, go do something else (or use my Win 8.1 laptop, which I usually hibernate), then proceed with whatever I wanted to do. I still have to break this habit.

[jr2]

So, I just completed my hardware upgrade and horrendously awful accompanying OS reinstall upgrade (7. Upgrade to 10. Clea install 10. Cry), and I have to say...

I really, REALLY like Windows 10.

Also, my system boots to login screen in about 6 seconds.

You know Win 10 can activate using a genuine 7 or 8.1 key now right?   

[MP-Ryan]

So, I just completed my hardware upgrade and horrendously awful accompanying OS reinstall upgrade (7. Upgrade to 10. Clea install 10. Cry), and I have to say...

I really, REALLY like Windows 10.

Also, my system boots to login screen in about 6 seconds.

You know Win 10 can activate using a genuine 7 or 8.1 key now right?   

I did, and when I researched that it was reported as only for systems ALREADY upgraded to a Windows 10 license via the upgrade process, not for brand-new clean installs.

[jr2]

So, I just completed my hardware upgrade and horrendously awful accompanying OS reinstall upgrade (7. Upgrade to 10. Clea install 10. Cry), and I have to say...

I really, REALLY like Windows 10.

Also, my system boots to login screen in about 6 seconds.

You know Win 10 can activate using a genuine 7 or 8.1 key now right?   

I did, and when I researched that it was reported as only for systems ALREADY upgraded to a Windows 10 license via the upgrade process, not for brand-new clean installs.

“We have received a lot of feedback from Insiders on making it easier to activate Windows 10 on devices that take advantage of the free upgrade offer to genuine Windows by using existing Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 product keys. If you install this build of the Windows 10 Insider Preview on a PC and it doesn’t automatically activate, you can enter the product key from Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 used to activate the prior Windows version on the same device to activate Windows 10 by going to Settings > Update & security > Activation and selecting Change Product Key. If you do a clean install of Windows 10 by booting off the media, you can also enter the product key from prior Windows versions on qualifying devices during setup.”