Patrick Klepek, for Kotaku:
Those stories about people getting accidentally upgraded to Windows 10 aren’t a myth; it happened to me a few months ago! For a while, when the upgrade box would pop up, I’d simply schedule it for a later time—rinse ‘n repeat. Then, for whatever reason, it decided to spontaneously upgrade overnight. Windows 10 subsequently locked me out of my files, thanks to a glitch, and broke my connection to the Internet, due to driver issues.
I couldn’t figure out what happened until I read this excellent piece at PC World by Brad Chacos, in which he pointed out a change Microsoft made.
My father-in-law has his own dental practice. And this past weekend, I was there looking at some equipment. In his office, he has a Windows 7-based server that serves all the operatory computers via WAN/LAN. When we first booted the server, it was acting funny.[1]
We thought nothing of it, and went elsewhere in the office to do something else. When we noticed that the satellite computers in the operatories weren’t receiving data from the server, we knew something was amiss.
We then went back to the server, only to find that Windows 7 was attempting to upgrade the server to Windows 10. I thought this was weird because from my XP days, I couldn’t remember Microsoft ever forcing users to upgrade to the then-flagship Windows operating system, Vista.
Turns Out™, this has been happening all over the place for the Windows 10 transition.
In case you were wondering, the cheapest available Macintosh new from Apple is the Mac mini, for $499. Or, if you detest Apple hardware (are you a real person?), you could always build a Hackintosh. Either way, you can save yourself from an OS that is both creepy and annoying.
I’m of little help, unfortunately. My last Windows experience was almost 10 years ago. ↩