Microsoft pays woman $10,000 over forced Windows 10 upgrade

[Kat]

Microsoft’s pushy Windows 10 upgrade tactics have finally come back to haunt them. Well, a little, anyway. They’ve just paid a woman $10,000 over an unwanted upgrade.

Travel agency owner Teri Goldstein swears up and down that she didn’t want the upgrade and never asked for it, either. “I had never heard of Windows 10,” she told the Seattle Times — not until she found it installed on her system and it started crashing on a regular basis. That’s not the sort of thing you need happening to a computer that you use to run your small business.

Goldstein says that her computer was unusable “for days at a time,” and she says that she reached out to Microsoft Support for help. That didn’t solve her problem, so she decided it was time for Plan B. She filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, seeking damages to cover lost wages and the cost of a new computer — presumably a nice, stable system that’s running good ol’ Windows 7.



Microsoft pays woman $10,000 over forced Windows 10 upgrade | Microsoft | Geek.com


I know others have had W10 forced upon them. I wanted it, and got it right away after it was available. I don't regret it so far. Think I have had it at least a year, maybe more.

 

[TheOldSchool]

Lol $10,000 and freakin' Microsoft

 

[frigidweirdo]

Microsoft’s pushy Windows 10 upgrade tactics have finally come back to haunt them. Well, a little, anyway. They’ve just paid a woman $10,000 over an unwanted upgrade.

Travel agency owner Teri Goldstein swears up and down that she didn’t want the upgrade and never asked for it, either. “I had never heard of Windows 10,” she told the Seattle Times — not until she found it installed on her system and it started crashing on a regular basis. That’s not the sort of thing you need happening to a computer that you use to run your small business.

Goldstein says that her computer was unusable “for days at a time,” and she says that she reached out to Microsoft Support for help. That didn’t solve her problem, so she decided it was time for Plan B. She filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, seeking damages to cover lost wages and the cost of a new computer — presumably a nice, stable system that’s running good ol’ Windows 7.



Microsoft pays woman $10,000 over forced Windows 10 upgrade | Microsoft | Geek.com


I know others have had W10 forced upon them. I wanted it, and got it right away after it was available. I don't regret it so far. Think I have had it at least a year, maybe more.

If you have an old computer, it might cause problems. I have windows 7 on a 4 year old laptop, and it works just fine for me, I've figured the stuff out, and so I'll stick to it. Can't wait till they stop hassling me about it.

They were wrong to do what they did, it happened to me, but I caught it before it downloaded, I clicked the X and then it said something and I was like.... something's wrong here and stopped it. It was morally wrong what they did but $10,000 isn't much for a company like Microsoft, that's probably dinner and a hotel room with a prostitute for them.

 

[Kat]

Microsoft’s pushy Windows 10 upgrade tactics have finally come back to haunt them. Well, a little, anyway. They’ve just paid a woman $10,000 over an unwanted upgrade.

Travel agency owner Teri Goldstein swears up and down that she didn’t want the upgrade and never asked for it, either. “I had never heard of Windows 10,” she told the Seattle Times — not until she found it installed on her system and it started crashing on a regular basis. That’s not the sort of thing you need happening to a computer that you use to run your small business.

Goldstein says that her computer was unusable “for days at a time,” and she says that she reached out to Microsoft Support for help. That didn’t solve her problem, so she decided it was time for Plan B. She filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, seeking damages to cover lost wages and the cost of a new computer — presumably a nice, stable system that’s running good ol’ Windows 7.



Microsoft pays woman $10,000 over forced Windows 10 upgrade | Microsoft | Geek.com


I know others have had W10 forced upon them. I wanted it, and got it right away after it was available. I don't regret it so far. Think I have had it at least a year, maybe more.

If you have an old computer, it might cause problems. I have windows 7 on a 4 year old laptop, and it works just fine for me, I've figured the stuff out, and so I'll stick to it. Can't wait till they stop hassling me about it.

They were wrong to do what they did, it happened to me, but I caught it before it downloaded, I clicked the X and then it said something and I was like.... something's wrong here and stopped it. It was morally wrong what they did but $10,000 isn't much for a company like Microsoft, that's probably dinner and a hotel room with a prostitute for them.

They do need to stop harassing people about it. W10 on a 4 yr old LT with 7 should take the upgrade just fine though.

 

[Alystyr]

W10 on a 4 yr old LT with 7 should take the upgrade just fine though.

But that's not the point. The point was, the lady got something that she neither asked for nor needed, and when it was forced on her, it caused business losses. If M$'s so-called "tech support" would have had a good enough grasp of English to talk her through a rollback to 7, she wouldn't have needed to file suit.
I'm with frigidwierdo - I'm running Win 7 and I'm perfectly content with it. The only way that I'll "upgrade" is when developers start making software artificially incompatible with Win 7 like they did with XP.

 

[beagle9]

W10 on a 4 yr old LT with 7 should take the upgrade just fine though.

But that's not the point. The point was, the lady got something that she neither asked for nor needed, and when it was forced on her, it caused business losses. If M$'s so-called "tech support" would have had a good enough grasp of English to talk her through a rollback to 7, she wouldn't have needed to file suit.
I'm with frigidwierdo - I'm running Win 7 and I'm perfectly content with it. The only way that I'll "upgrade" is when developers start making software artificially incompatible with Win 7 like they did with XP.

.

This is what happened to my android phone yesterday... I was going down the road when all of a sudden my phone made the sound that it makes when you click on the Google app that says "Listening". This is where you are supposed to say something to it like say ask it a question so it can make a phone call for you or so it can look up something for you. Anyhow like I said I didn't do anything to activate the app, it just activated on it's own. So I looked and it said listening, so I said to it "no one has ask you to listen". Then it brought up a web site or app that tried to get me to download an app. I thought what the heck ? Then I couldn't help but wonder if this was some kind of way that Google provided a company a window like this.

So it made me wonder if Google had sold this company add space in so that it could get to a potential customer by the method used ? I mean how else would the Google app just engage without me doing anything, and then say "listening", and then this add pops up, and then it wanted to install something ? It's like I had no control over what the Google listening app was doing when it done it.

Then I was on a local news site, and then I clicked on a link that was down below or near the bottom of the site. While browsing the link a warning/alert popped up on my phone that said "your phone has 4 viruses, and you must go to Google play and click on something to clean up the viruses. I ignored the warning, because I thought bull crap this phone doesn't have no viruses. This was an add that was within the browser Google Chrome. So I just hit the back on my phone to get it to go away. It did, but when I clicked on Google Chrome again, it popped back up. I read it again, and it said that if I ignored the thing, that I would be locked out of my phone. I hit the back button on my phone again, and this time I tried to reboot the phone as well. Well it locked me out my phone. I called my Phone service Verizon, and after 3 attempts by 3 service reps, they couldn't get me into my phone. Then they transfered me to Motorola or something, and they got me back in. The tech guy said that someone is selling add space to this company who has designed this add like a virus, and that he unlocks about 5 phones a day because of it. I had Norton antivirus, but it got by that because it shows up as an add and not a virus he said.

He said he doesn't know why it's not illegal for a company to use the method in trying to sell something like a cleaning app for the phone or what ever it was. He said somebody is selling the company the add space to do this, and that it is aggravating to say the least. I know that it sure messed my phone up for about a few hours or more. They had me go to Google Chrome when I got into the phone, and I had to delete some things in so that the add or virus would be gone after that. I know I won't be going to that local news website anymore, and especially not click on any links in a site like that.

 

[Pogo]

This Windows hijack is exactly what happened to me as described in this thread although I didn't (far as I know) suffer permanent damage beyond having my work interrupted for three hours and then having to reconstruct the work I had in progress when the hijack occurred. But I can't help noticing that had the same hijack happened at a more critical time 24 hours earlier it could have cost me my job.

This is a fantastic tool that Ringel05 suggested in that thread. I strongly recommend it for getting rid of that Win10 nagware and preventing such hijcacks. The program's brilliant, smooth, and literally loads up in 30 seconds. Poof.

GWX Control Panel

Good on this customer victim for getting Microplop to cop to what they did. I want some for my lost time and work too.