For some people, Microsoft's strong-arm GWX approach is far worse than an annoyance:
When you're stuck in the middle of the Central African Republic (CAR) trying to protect the wildlife from armed poachers and the Lord's Resistance Army, then life's pretty tough. And now Microsoft has made it tougher with Windows 10 upgrades.
The Chinko Project manages roughly 17,600 square kilometres (6,795 square miles) of rainforest and savannah in the east of the CAR, near the border with South Sudan. Money is tight, and so is internet bandwidth. So the staff was more than a little displeased when one of the donated laptops the team uses began upgrading to Windows 10 automatically, pulling in gigabytes of data over a radio link.
And it's not just bandwidth bills they have to worry about.
"If a forced upgrade happened and crashed our PCs while in the middle of coordinating rangers under fire from armed militarized poachers, blood could literally be on Microsoft's hands," said one member of the team.
I hadn't previously considered this, but it really is obvious when you think about it. Windows is all over the place, in all kinds of mission-critical applications, and some of those missions are dangerous. If your PC starts "upgrading" in the middle of a life-or-death moment, out in the bush somewhere, the result can be actual death, and not just the videogame variety.
The Reg has been reporting a lot on the Windows 10 upgrade fiasco, so decided to investigate – and the story checks out. A team member told us the Chinko Project uses satellite communications for internet access and gets charged quite a lot for data, so the multi-gigabyte automatic upgrade was even more frustrating than for the rest of us.
"We don't need to upgrade our internet, as the limited bandwidth we have is sufficient. But we just can't abide these forced upgrades and secret downloads," one member, who asked to remain anonymous, told El Reg. "We have donated laptops with Windows 7 and 8 all over the place that I'm trying to track down and fix."
To add insult to injury, the team had only just got their satellite system up and running again after a storm tore open the roof of the building housing the setup. After taking a battering, the hardware is operational again, but is needed for far more serious things than pumping up Windows 10 usage figures.
Every single day brings new horror stories like this one. I keep wondering if there's a point at which Microsoft stop merely managing the backlash, endangering lives in the process, and actually does the right thing. So far, there's no sign that such a point exists.
Fortunately, you don't have to wait for that, since every day also seems to bring a new article on stopping GWX in its tracks, like this one from MyGaming:
Unschedule your update
The above measures only work if you haven’t registered for and scheduled your update.
Microsoft also provides instructions for how to cancel your upgrade to Windows 10.
- Click on the “Get Windows 10” icon.
- Follow the instructions to reschedule or cancel your Windows 10 upgrade
- Confirm that you want to cancel your Windows 10 upgrade.
- A final reminder will also appear 15 minutes before the scheduled upgrade. This is a chance to cancel your Windows 10 upgrade before your system reboots automatically.
This is interesting for a couple of reasons:
- it's the first article I've seen which gives a detailed walk-through of the upgrade cancellation process, something I've only seen brief mentions of elsewhere, and
- it's the first such article that I've seen on a website dedicated to gaming.
Gaming media sites are normally very much part of the hype machine, and most of them have been pro-Win10 so far (which may be partly why gamers have adopted Win10 much more quickly than other users), so the fact that even the gaming press is turning against Microsoft on this one seems to mark something of a paradigm shift.
Also, in today's roundup of Never10 news: I've added another link to the sidebar for GWX Stopper, a third 3rd-party program which will stop GWX from "upgrading" your PC to Windows 10. You're welcome.