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We have been hearing reports of PCs upgrading themselves to Windows 10 without the owner's knowledge for a while now and for businesses in particular, this can be a big problem. Teri Goldstein, a California based business owner had this happen, and in response she sued Microsoft for $10,000 and actually managed to win.
The business in this case had computers running Windows 7 and due to the Windows 10 install, these machines then became unstable, costing a few days worth of work. The $10,000 won in this case was to cover the cost of the computer itself, along with the revenue lost in the days following the upgrade.
Windows 10 has been a free upgrade for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 owners for a while but the real problems came when Windows 10 turned into a ‘recommended update', meaning those with automatic updates switched on would eventually end up with a surprise Windows 10 install.
Microsoft did plan to appeal this case and obviously disagrees with the court's decision. However, as Techraptor points out, the appeal itself would be an expensive process and not really worth the additional time or cost.
KitGuru Says: Microsoft's approach to getting users to upgrade to Windows 10 has been criticised by many, so I'm not entirely surprised there was a lawsuit here. Though, I am a little surprised at the outcome, after all Microsoft does have a very expensive legal team. Have any of you had issues with Windows 10 at all since July?
I’m sure if they would have appealed they would have won because at some point all MS has to do is either ask for the computer or send someone to take a look at it. I can assure you that the computer in question will have malware on it and maybe even a virus or 2 which caused the failed down grade. But this does not excuse on how MS has took it upon itself to pretty much force an upgrade on everyone. a lot of business class software has not been tested by the dev’s to run on win 10 or heck even win 8.1. Most software will most likely run fine on either win 8.1 or win 10 if it was working on win 7 before hand but not always this is why the brute force approach MS took the last few months on upgrades is totally wrong. I always tell my customers that ask about win 10 upgrade to make sure the system is cleaned either by me or by their antivirus and anti spyware software just to make sure things will go hopefully smoothly during the upgrade. I have cleaned every customer computer that has come into my store before doing the upgrade and I have not had any of the problems some people have had with the upgrade. This lady should have gave the win 10 a try to see if it would work to her liking before trying to rip it out of the system because lets face it Windows 7 even though is a great OS has a shelf life that is coming to an end and later on this lady will be forced to upgrade to win 10 & have to pay for it then and probably will complain and try to sue MS again because she had to pay for it the second time around. She says this will cover loss of wages and buying a new computer I’m sorry but the new system will come with a factory install of Windows 10 on it. Well unless you buy a business class unit then it may come with Windows 7 Pro or 8.1 Pro but the specs will be very low end as in only 4GB ram small hard etc but who knows maybe that would be an upgrade to what she had…lol
I love how she said she had never even heard of windows 10 until the forced upgrade. I’m with her on everything else but she’d have to be living under a rock for that to not be a complete bullshit statement
In the real world, not the tech entusiast world, most people couldn’t care less what version of Windows they run their applications on, providing it works for them. They have no clue what version of Windows they have, what CPU they have, what RAM they have, if their USB is 2.0 or 3.0, and they move along, taking care of their business, their customers, their lives.
A stealth upgrade that changes the look and feel of the system they know is clearly not welcome. And if it stops making things work, then it deserves some legal action.