![windows update red x windows update red x](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/348HBBxOzo0/maxresdefault.jpg)
- #WINDOWS UPDATE RED X FOR FREE#
- #WINDOWS UPDATE RED X UPGRADE#
- #WINDOWS UPDATE RED X REGISTRATION#
- #WINDOWS UPDATE RED X WINDOWS 10#
![windows update red x windows update red x](https://www.repairwin.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/image-88.png)
What you’re actually building is a group of users who will either fight to hold on to Windows 7 / 8.1 with both hands or will shift to either OS X or Linux.
#WINDOWS UPDATE RED X UPGRADE#
The people now being captured by these dragnets are those who haven’t wanted to do so, and forcing them into scenarios where they mistakenly upgrade anyway will not create feelings of warmth and joy.
#WINDOWS UPDATE RED X WINDOWS 10#
The people who wanted to upgrade to Windows 10 have already done so.
#WINDOWS UPDATE RED X REGISTRATION#
This is an example of a dark pattern - a pattern built into an application designed to trick you into making certain choices, similar to how adware will sometimes flip the “No” and “Yes” dialog boxes, or use registration choices that require you to check a box if you want to opt out of something as opposed to opting into it. Making the opt-out button slightly more prominent while changing the function of X is no improvement at all. It has adopted malware-like obfuscation tactics designed to trick people into choosing an upgrade they didn’t want, including changing the function of icons and hiding the option not to upgrade.
![windows update red x windows update red x](https://www.repairwin.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image-5.png)
Over the past 10 months, GWX.exe has become an invasive application.
#WINDOWS UPDATE RED X FOR FREE#
In the beginning, GWX.exe served a useful purpose - it told users that they were eligible for free Windows 10 notifications, and it communicated when PCs were ready to update. It’s time for Microsoft to step back and consider the long-term consequences of its actions. It can even argue that it’s now operating according to its own best practices, especially since GWX.exe runs in the background anyway unless you kill it via GWX Control Panel or Task Manager (and it restarts itself if all you use is Task Manager, so not much luck there.) In other words: Microsoft has technically done nothing wrong with flip-flopping on treating the X as a “Close this dialog” option as opposed to a “Cancel this process” option. The problem is, X generally is interpreted as exit, and there are plenty of Microsoft applications, including Office, Internet Explorer, and Edge, that still follow this behavior. There are many, many modern applications that don’t automatically exit when you click the “X” button - and Microsoft’s formal guidelines as far back as Windows 95 instructed developers that they should treat the X as a “Close” button, not an “Exit” button. Microsoft would undoubtedly argue that this change isn’t actually a change at all. PC World’s Brad Chacos wrote about how his wife was caught up in the upgrade, and reports have been coming in from Reddit as well. The problem is, Microsoft just changed one of the core behaviors of the GWX.exe application without telling anyone it did so. Last week, ZDNet hailed these changes as a positive step for Microsoft, since there’s now a “Click Here” link to cancel the upgrade as opposed to no clear method of doing so. Clicking the X does nothing to stop the upgrade process now.Ĭlicking the X in this dialog doesn’t actually cancel anything. According to reports streaming in from multiple sources online, Microsoft has changed this behavior. The company has reworked its installation messages to imply that consumers couldn’t opt out of upgrading, but clicking on the red “X” at the top right of those messages still canceled the process. In keeping with this goal, Microsoft has steadily made it more difficult to opt out of Windows 10 upgrades. The company has multiple reasons for doing this - it wants to prevent a long tail of Windows 7 or 8.1 users from dragging out its support cycles (similar to what happened to Windows XP), it’s prominently pledged to hit one billion users on Windows 10, and it undoubtedly wants to push the market as a whole towards its new revenue model, which is much less focused on Windows 10 license sales, and more about advertising and in-OS content sales. For months, Microsoft has been stepping up the pressure on users to upgrade to Windows 10.