Windows 10: No such thing as a free lunch!
Just 24 hours after being made available, Microsoft announced that it had been downloaded on over 14 million machines. It’s not an anomaly either, in the weeks since, reports are that the pace has remained at similar levels; and that it’s not showing signs of slowing down anytime soon.
According to many, Windows 10 is faster, smoother and more user-friendly than any Windows operating system that has come before it. Windows 10 is everything Windows 8 should have been, addressing nearly all of the major problems users had with Microsoft’s previous-generation platform in one fell swoop.
In previous posts, we’ve highlighted many of the useful and interesting features Microsoft’s latest operating system has promoted. Now that it has been in the wild for a while, we wanted to make you aware of some potential unwanted consequences.
Installation Problems
We’re aware of reports from both the internet and visitors to our Retail Store, of users with one or more of the following installation problems:
- Unable to upgrade
- Stuck while upgrading
- Black screen after upgrading
- Slow operation
- Cortana missing or malfunctioning
- Email sending issues
- Sound woes, touchpad troubles, and getting trapped in reboot loops
Unexpected Behavior
Even in the case of successful upgrades, we’d like to make you aware of some interesting “features” with unexpected consequences. Some are even being labeled as “dangerous” or having potentially serious legal implications…
Wi-Fi Sense – although it can be manually disabled, this feature is enabled by default. You should know that it will open up your personal Wi-Fi network to anyone in your contacts that use Hotmail, Skype, Outlook or even Facebook! So if any of these folks come within range, they could secretly access your system from hundreds of yards away. Possibly even supposing that the government would no longer need a search warrant for your surrendered privacy.
Phoning Home – in order to enable the artificial intelligence of Cortana and the cloud features of OneDrive, as expected, there’s plenty of new internet traffic. However, even when these features are manually disabled, Windows 10 continues to send and receive data from Microsoft servers on a regular basis. Power users have confirmed that – even the simple act of hitting the Start Button – comes with unexpected two-way communication with Microsoft. Folks scared off by Google & Apple’s privacy policies now have nowhere to turn.
Bandwidth Sharing – also enabled by default, is the Windows 10 behavior of sharing your network with other PC’s on the same network. In a BitTorrent-like fashion, your computer may decide to download and share data being requested by other computers in your home and office. For the most part, to distribute the Windows Update load across all connected machines.
Software Police – Although difficult to say how this will actually be used in practice, Microsoft updated its 12,000-word licensing agreement to include language that essentially gives them the right to remotely disable pirated software installed on Windows 10 machines.
Forced Updates – although you can delay automatic updates for varying periods of time, the non-Enterprise versions of Windows 10 will require all updates to be installed within 6 days’ time. The high data traffic associated with all these fixes are catching many off-guard, causing them to blow through their wireless data caps, resulting in huge overage fees.
Lessons To Be Learned
We’ve all heard the sayings … “There’s a reason why it’s free,” “There’s always a catch,” and more. As more of these settings are discovered, it’s becoming obvious that Microsoft should be making them clearer during installation, or simply disable them by default. As they can be used beyond original intent, and may not coincide with everyone’s personal privacy policy.
More transparency from Microsoft is needed. And we’ll continue to bring these issues to the forefront, for your safety and understanding.
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Chief Expert, NDT & Quality at W?rtsil?
9 年Global espionage powered by ????. Linux here I come. Privacy should be the standard not a possible option?
Systems Administrator at RiverTech LLC
9 年Go ahead and update to Windows 10 as your heavy hitting primary system. I guess you won't mind the massive amount of data mining that is being colected against you.
Software Engineer in search of a new position! Just finished a 3-year contract for PHP work (classic ASP to modern PHP conversion).
9 年13 pages of privacy settings doesn't help either.
Technical Support Representative
9 年XP should remind you of a sieve. No Security Updates and/or patches and no support :) Windows 7 has no mainstream support either (still getting security updates until 2020). Perhaps it's time to go for something more open source. Everything in software has an EOL date (EOL = End Of Life). Linux is not perfect but at least you won't have to spend money to update/upgrade just some time backing up your data and re-installing every 5 years (hardware failures will force you to re-install faster than software needs but who's counting) As for games, since I know your taste brother :) that's changing in Linux too. Look at all the games in Valve's Steam and you can see that you can get lots of Linux games (pretty good ones too, some even free to play). . I'm currently playing War Thunder ( https://warthunder.com/en ) on my Linux Laptop, which is pretty interesting if you consider that I'm more of a car guy than a plane and tank guy (look me up if you decide to give it a try ). And look at FlightGear (https://www.flightgear.org/) as a replacement to Flight Simulator Linux doesn't have the luster of Microsoft or Apple but as far as capabilities go, it's right up there (and perhaps more). It all depends on what people want to do with it.
Mike's Computer Solutions
9 年Hey, how have you been? Been reading your blog as I get it emailed to me, I have some issues with Windows 10 that I've noticed aren't getting as much attention as they should. My issues are having trouble staying asleep with windows updates set for me to reboot when I want to & my power settings with everything I can disable, the problem still exists. Trying one last option which is going to the task scheduler and turn off the feature that's causing the problem. I've installed windows 10 pro on at least 12 machines so far, three of them had install issues, but I was able to fix the problem by a workaround, this seems to be the norm since not every machine is the same it has the same apps installed, I could see the issues happening there anyway. The last thing is I have an Nvidia video card that is compatible with Windows 10 & fails a lot, the hardware itself is fine because I ran a stress tests on it, not sure what the deal is there but it always gives me the same error code & it blue screens after use for about 15 minutes mostly random, but it's supposed to be a supported card though.