Windows 10 Forced Upgrade

[Tolayon]

Just recently when I was running my Windows 10 laptop again, I went to the "update and security" page of the system settings just to see what was going on. I was still on version 1909, which will reach EOL in a few weeks. But oh "joy", Windows had already taken care of that itself! When I looked, I saw the regular monthly updates for 1909 pending, while the big whopper "update" (actually an upgrade) to 20H2 was in full swing.

Well, I let it do its thing, of which the installation alone took about 40 to 50 minutes; then about the same amount of time was needed for processing said upgrade, which included several reboots.

The good news is, nothing broke as far as I can tell and everything is still in its place with Windows 10 20H2. And it also appears to use only 5 additional GBs on the SSD - I was afraid it would be far more, like up to 32 GB due to a mandatory backup of the entire previous system.

That being said, I'm still not happy with the forced, mandatory upgrade (I guess the regular 1909 updates weren't even applied). I deliberately set up my Windows system with a separate administrator account, the password of which I have to enter every time I want to install something. But all the updates and upgrades always happen without me having to type in any password, which definitley proves that on Windows, you are NOT fully in charge of your own machine.

Compare that to Linux upgrades - a few months ago I installed Ubuntu Mate 18.04 in VirtualBox and upgraded it to 20.04 soon after. It was like a literal walk in the ballpark, went without any major glitches, and of course I had to start it all by entering my user password.
And in the coming weeks I will be upgrading my current Fedora 33 install (also MATE) to 34, to which I'm looking forward, even if it will be in the terminal (but easy with the copy & paste instructions, I already upgraded Fedora once that way).

Either way it took/ takes just about 40 Minutes and only on time of rebooting each.

[JoeFootball]

But all the updates and upgrades always happen without me having to type in any password, which definitley proves that on Windows, you are NOT fully in charge of your own machine.

Yep, it's my limited understanding that Windows will indeed upgrade itself if it's booted and can find an internet connection. No user login required.

[jmorris84]

I once read that by going into the settings and telling the system you are on a data connection, it will prevent the auto update, but that didn't seem to work well for me either. I also have my system set to not automatically grab a WiFi connection and it still seems to do it anyway from time to time. It just seems like an OS that was designed to do what it wants, when it wants.

[Portreve]

Two things...

First, I thought in looking at this thread's title that there was at least a chance it was going to be something like “Windows 10 forced me to upgrade to Linux Mint” but, sadly, this wasn't the case.

Second, because of what happened during the era of Windows XP, Microsoft has felt themselves being forced and squeezed into doing *something* to combat the tide of viruses and other malware, computers being hijacked to take part in zombie botnets, and so forth. This, combined with the changing dynamic over the last 20 years of how software is being licensed (and/or distributed) I guess nobody should really be surprised that Microsoft pretty much feels they have license to do just about anything with deployed copies of their OS.

Of course, had their stuff not been a pile of dog poo from the beginning, maybe they wouldn't be doing this now. Well, that coupled with the fact that most people who have used computers over the last probably 25-30 years don't know anything about anything, and just kind of assume that whatever goes on is simply "how computers work" and therefore put no thought or effort into gainsaying any of this.

[AndyMH]

First thing I do with a win10 install is turn off auto update, that way an update happens at a time of my choosing, second thing I do is turn off fast boot.

[Tolayon]

First, I thought in looking at this thread's title that there was at least a chance it was going to be something like “Windows 10 forced me to upgrade to Linux Mint” but, sadly, this wasn't the case.

Well, it did sort of, my main machine/ old Windows 7 PC never saw anything of its successor installed on its hard drive ... which I would have had to replace by an SSD to get anything out of it. But instead I bought the said laptop with Win 10 preinstalled, which I need for some remaining tasks and boot up about once a week. My main pc/ daily driver, however has been on Linux Mint 19.2 since February last year .

[DAMIEN1307]

First thing I do with a win10 install is turn off auto update, that way an update happens at a time of my choosing, second thing I do is turn off fast boot.

The first thing i do with a Win 10 install is to install some sort of flavour of Linux right over it with extreme prejudice...lol...DAMIEN