Microsoft will start forcing Windows 10 updates on machines that are eligible for the free upgrade as soon as this week. And you won’t be able to do much to stop it. Windows 10 is now a recommended update, which means it’ll download itself on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 PCs and attempt to install.
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“As we shared in late October on the Windows Blog, we are committed to making it easy for our Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 customers to upgrade to Windows 10,” a Microsoft spokesperson told The Verge. “We updated the upgrade experience today to help our customers, who previously reserved their upgrade, schedule a time for their upgrade to take place.”
In theory, there’s really nothing wrong with moving to Windows 10. Sure, there are some privacy concerns, but they can be mitigated. And you can definitely roll your computer back to the previous Windows version if the latest Microsoft OS doesn’t meet your needs.
But the fact that Windows 10 will begin downloading automatically on computers later this week might be annoying to certain users. For example, the bulky Windows 10 install files will take up a huge chuck of your storage space. Not to mention that the background download might lead to data overages if parts of the download happen over cellular connections. If you connect via 3G or 4G very often, you’d better turn off the automatic update download features on your machine.
If those are not problems for you, then the recommended Windows 10 should have no other negative impact on your Windows experience. You’ll be able to opt-out from the prompts if you’d rather not update to Windows 10 and keep using your older version instead.
