- Microsoft told us: "For individuals who have chosen to receive automatic updates through Windows Update, we help upgradable devices get ready for Windows 10 by downloading the files they’ll need if they decide to upgrade.
"When the upgrade is ready, the customer will be prompted to install Windows 10 on the device."
In other words, if you are patching via Patch Tuesday, as you should of course be, then you are going to get a big hefty folder on your hard drive ready so you can update to Windows 10 on demand.
I'll be honest - aside from the privacy-conscious user, I see no reason why people shouldn't upgrade to Windows 10. I've been using it for what, a month now? And I still discover features it has that I just plain love. Windows 10 is a great-looking, fantastically-working OS - if "half of the Windows version sucks" (95, XP, 7 VS 98, Vista, 8? 8.1?), then yes - while I found Windows 8.1 to be quite a decent OS (on par with 7), Windows 10 actually follows the curve (or breaks it if you count 8.1 as the decent upgrade to follow the curve) by being a LOT better than 7 and 8.1 both.
I agree with all of this. Windows 10 has been a lot of fun when I've played around with it on other peoples machines. However, what really bugs me about this is how difficult it is to remove. I don't particularly mind having to pick and choose updates but if I do miss one and end up downloading it, let me remove it! I've done just about everything I can locally to remove the download folder and have gotten the download down from ~6.5Gb to just under a gig now. Next step which I haven't done yet is to boot into Hiren's or Linux and try to remove it that way. This is just an absurd amount of work for something I should be able to opt out of. End rant.
If you meant the Windows 7/8/8.1 update, that's fair - such a large update SHOULD have some warning or be opt-in - I know that if I had that update on my previous install of Windows 7, it would have rendered my computer unusable WAY before it finished downloading - I had trouble keeping the free space over 4GB (I heard that you should have free space equivalent to your RAM to make sure you have swapspace) because of that WinSXS bullshit, and ONCE I used a program that filled that hard-drive 'till I had 200MB left, and my computer slowed to a crawl. (Context: the way my computer is configured, I have a ~50GB partition on my HDD for Windows, and I install everything else I can, which I found out includes Windows' documents folder which encompasses Music, Pictures, Downloads, Videos and Documents, on a secondary 1TB partition - that way, if the OS does something I don't like and is hard to get rid of, or I made a mistake and scrapped the OS, or something else, I can just call blank slate on the OS partition and start from scratch without losing other data or needing to reinstall my Steam library). If Windows 10 itself is hard to remove when installed? See above comment - it's not an issue for me (and I urge anyone who can bother to do the same, it saves a LOT of time when reinstalling an OS)
Yeaah no, I can see how it irks people. But at least on Windows 7 (not sure about 8 or 8.1) I think there's a setting you can tweak in Windows Update to make ALL updates opt-in. But then again, with the way this is talked about, it might bypass that as well - welp.
This is an issue for people on bit-limited plans, people using cell service for Internet and people with usage caps. I have six PCs in the house. If they all get this update that is 20GB. On top of normal use. I've hit the 300GB soft cap multiple times with my normal useage, this download would certainly do it. Then you have the poor bastards in Canada that have a 100GB data limit on their bad internet...
Yeah - I'm lucky enough, I found a small Canadian provider which provides decent internet with no data cap for not an absurdly large amount of money. It is a big issue over here though.