Almost happened to me a few months ago, I wasn't sitting at my PC for while because of a big download and during that time the PC tried to upgrade, luckily I noticed it just 30 secondes and were able to cancel it before it was finished.

Lol

Exactly.

When installing just don't accept the defaults. Go in and uncheck all of the things that offer to send data to MS, you'll be fine.

I still have no regrets at all of turning of my Windows 7 updates completely. I don't recall exactly when I did that - last year, September comes to mind - anyways, it was when I suspected that MS was going to start "backporting" Windows 10 "forcing" crap into W7 updates that I did so - and not long after, that came to pass. I was like, "phew! Glad I saw that one coming.." <g>

Yep, that'll work. But for how long?

MS is showing us in no uncertain terms the lengths it is willing to go to in order to get things its way. I can easily foresee an update to Win10 down the track which will turn these options back on - and then remove the option to turn them off altogether. After all, since you 'chose' Win10, you must have 'chosen' to be ok with ads and tracking, right?

In other words, people are focusing on the Win10 upgrade shenanigans, and seem to be ignoring the possibility that MS might try the same tricks somewhere else. How trustworthy is MS now?

Whilst that is all true, and I fully agree with that, the simple fact is this, Win10 will be their OS going forward. There is always a grace period for older OS's, but eventually they will stop working for newer products, or be easier to hack if connected to the web. So you choice going forward will be to use Win10 or to move to another OS, that may be next year, it may be in 4 years, but eventually you will have to.
There are programs out there which remove a lot of this spyware, and all the bloatware installed as default, to a varying degree, me I am sitting on the fence, I have Win7 on one ssd, Win10 on another, and Linux on a further one.
Whilst its not good for the consumer, this is the way the whole industry is and has been moving for a long time, everything will be in the clound, always connected, and the user will own nothing, will not even have anything locally - this is what the industry wants and has the resource to achieve regardless of what the consumer wants as they have no choice. Its the same with any digital product - TV streamed via netflix or something, music - streamed by one of those services, games streamed from steam, os and apps hosted in the cloud. This all benefits the industry many times over from control, through advertising, through reduced costs, to less need for support and such like. So if half the world turned off Windows it still wouldn't matter to then at all.

Not all industry is crap like that. You forgot about Gog. :P

Also, if half the world turned off Windows, MS would change idea immediately, as seen with the Start menu issue.
Unfortunately, the Win10 imposition strategy will work quite well for normal users.. :(

I hadn't forgotten, there are always exceptions, but they are small fry in comparison to the ones we are talking about.

What was seen with the start menu, ok they put a button there, but its still fecking awful to use. Its hardly a change.

In Microsofts, OS update you!

I'm not gonna update my Win7 until after July 29. so I've set it to not search for updates. I'm not really against Win10 since I tried Vista and that worked well for me even if people said it was terrible. But I just see no reason to update my 4 year old PC with a new OS. When I buy a new PC then sure I will get 10 but why should I do it now? And Microsoft's very shady tactics here just makes me even less inclined to update.

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There is a time & there is a place for upgrading windoze10, & that time & place is When the user fucking wants to!!

Several reasons why I refuse to, but most obvious is a lot of the games, gfx software I use will not work & as they`re old & not being patched any more, will probably never do so.

Doing stupid things like not giving options to refuse to upgrade & their recent hack where even clicking the top right "X" on the UI would still install windoze10 is beyond desperate.

But then, there are worse times that totally could fuck things up.....

https://i.imgur.com/ipn1233.jpg

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/4l2v5s/even_in_the_squad_car_i_cant_escape_windows_10/

Yes there are, now when you click X to the recommended window 10 update, Microsoft takes that as a yes you agree to.

https://www.grahamcluley.com/2016/05/microsoft-dirty-little-windows-10-upgrade-trick-sleeve/

The picture show you have the choice of clicking OK or X, so how to get out of the update? Alt + F4?

An OS acting like a nasty piece of malware -- Respect, Microsoft, that's real classy.

Amen. Regardless of the pros and cons of Win10, and whether or not it is a valid upgrade from older Windows versions, the shenanigans MS have pulled ever since they originally started pushing Win10 have been beyond ridiculous. The harder they try to force it on people, the more repulsed I am by the idea of installing it on any of my computers.

I love that windows 7 feature that allows you to disable auto updating.