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Windows 10 Anniversary Update To Roll Out On August 2 156

Posted by msmash from the affinity-for-Windows-updates dept.
Windows 10's first major update -- dubbed Anniversary Update -- will be released to users on August 2, according to a blog post published by Microsoft (Archive link). The company presumably posted the blog post ahead of the original publication plans, and as a result, quickly pulled the story. Windows 10 Anniversary Update will bring with it a number of major changes including extensions to Edge, and improvements to Cortana and Hello biometric feature. It will also mark the end of the one-year free Windows 10 update offer for Windows 7 and Windows 8.x users.
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Windows 10 Anniversary Update To Roll Out On August 2 More

Windows 10 Anniversary Update To Roll Out On August 2

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  • By any other name... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2016 @09:44AM (#52412967)
    This is a service pack.

    • Re: By any other name... (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Great! Always good to get a service pack that improves the security, stability, and performance of the system. Call it what you want but I'm excited for it!

      • You get that stuff from the periodic updates, not from a service pack.

    • Right. And I'm a bit worried about the understanding of basic English by the author of the summary. The sentence "a number of major changes including extensions to Edge, and improvements to Cortana and Hello biometric feature" clearly confuses the word "major" with "yawn-inducing".

  • Anniversary update.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 29, 2016 @09:51AM (#52413007)

    And then I have to re-turnoff Cortana, reset the switches to block MS-bound data, and in general, try
    to discover the new ways MS has made sure to F-up things so they can anal-probe my machine...

    • And then I have to re-turnoff Cortana,

      Even if you "turn off" Cortana, it's still running in the background. Try to kill it with Task Manager and it comes right back. There is a way to kill it permanently, but my experience has been that Cortana is the new Internet Explorer -- kill it and you hose your entire system.

      • Re:Anniversary update.... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by vux984 ( 928602 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2016 @11:38AM (#52413913)

        Even if you "turn off" Cortana, it's still running in the background.

        Yes and no. Yes, there absolutely is a process called Cortana running in the background. But its not still listening to your microphone, etc. Its providing backend services for stuff like location services.

        What's in a name?

        In theory Microsoft should have broken the functionality into two separate modules. "Cortana Personal Assistant" and "Cortana Services". Where the former is JUST the voice-mic-UI stuff; and the latter does all the other stuff -- the search functionality, location services, and provides the hooks that other apps connect to to add their "cortana" functionality, should you ever turn Cortana back on. ... of course people like your self would still freak about "Cortana Services" running even after the "Cortana Personal Assistant" went away so instead of calling it "Cortana Services" it should be called "wcmi_support" or something suitably innocuous. Then when you looked at the process list, nothing would be *called* cortana and you'd now be happy.

        Although nothing changed at all except the name of a process.

        Sometimes I think Microsoft should rename the Task Scheduler from "Schedule" to "Clippy" and "svchost" to "systemd" just for the fireworks display.

        • I'd be unhappy if there were services in the background of any name providing location services, indexing my files (I've always turned that off), and so forth. When I see my hard disk being constantly active when I've been sitting idle for an hour then I start getting suspicious of either malware or Microsoft bloat. Apple has an OSX update that tries to reduce CPU usage and improve power savings, whereas a Microsoft update seems to be about how to suck up even more of those cycles.

  • How does the "Free" licensing work? (Score:3)

    by wardrich86 ( 4092007 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2016 @09:52AM (#52413013)
    Is it worth doing the free upgrade and then downgrading? Will I be able to upgrade to W10 indefinitely on the off chance that they (or the community) fix up all the problems and snooping? How does the licensing work?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Exactly how would the community "fix up all the problems and snooping"? It's a closed source operating system, you are totally beholden to the manufacturer for any changes. And you have no say whatsoever in the design, implementation and quality of the product.

      The product is designed solely from the manufacturer's perspective; and that perspective is to extract as much revenue as possible from you directly or indirectly. Your wishes make not one iota of difference to them unless it means you will not be

      • Exactly how would the community "fix up all the problems and snooping"? It's a closed source operating system, you are totally beholden to the manufacturer for any changes. And you have no say whatsoever in the design, implementation and quality of the product.

        You're right, this can't be readily changed by the community at the OS level. However, Windows still (at least for the moment) gives users root access. I got sick of Cortana's executable starting up, so I went to the folder and did a 'deny all everyone' file permissions change; not even the system user can access it. O&O ShutUp 10 and Spybot AntiBeacon both reduce telemetry and set policies that disable many of the snooping/syncing features. It's possible to configure Windows Firewall to block system ap

        • In my opinion the ONLY way Windows 10 is going to EVER be tolerably safe to use is if you block the telemetry sites in a hardware firewall.. Home users are kinda out of luck unless they're clueful and use something like pfsense or other *real* firewall.. Just for fun, I did some testing a while back, took two laptops with Windows10 on them, one with a default-install, meaning all of the telemetry/spyware enabled, an MS account login, and a second laptop with a "castrated" install, local login account only,

        • Other than starting a "Whack-A-Mole" between the authors of this "Windows 10 Privacy Suite" and MS.. Sure this "Privacy Suite" might stop the spyware aspects of Windows10 *today* but if more and more people began to use said tool, and MS/NSA's data-collection started dropping off, you can bet there would be changes that would bypass/change things and re-enable the spyware aspects and then the devs of the privacy tool would counter those changes, Rise and Repeat, ad infinitum... OR the MS legal dept would j

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by vux984 ( 928602 )

      Is it worth doing the free upgrade and then downgrading?

      IMO Yes.

      Will I be able to upgrade to W10 indefinitely

      According to Microsoft yes. (at least on that hardware)

      on the off chance that they (or the community) fix up all the problems and snooping

      The community more or less already has, depending on your level of paranoia.

      Spybot Anti-Beacon

      And there are several other tools out there too.

      And for what its worth, unless you are disabling all updates and/or manually vetting every update to your win7/8 box the snooping is still a problem.

      For most people, whether you are on 7 or 10 you are probably best served with an anti-telemetry tool as the least hassle way of dealing with this. And since i

    • It works in that if you had win 7 or 8 and upgrade by the end date, you have a current windows license from now on. Windows is getting away from the old licensing scheme and now when you buy a new machine it will have Windows and will be updated for the life of the machine. Or you build a machine and buy a Windows license and it gets updates for the life of the machine, (which if you know what you are doing is indefinitely) Updates will be more like the cell phone market (except without carriers needless

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Is it worth doing the free upgrade and then downgrading? Will I be able to upgrade to W10 indefinitely on the off chance that they (or the community) fix up all the problems and snooping? How does the licensing work?

      The free upgrade is tied to your computer's Hardware ID.

      When you install Windows 10 your hardware ID is sent to Microsoft. As long as you don't make any major changes to your computer (new motherboard is the big one) you can do a clean install at any time and Windows 10 will continue to work just fine. It just checks your Hardware ID against the one Microsoft has on file and when they match everything is fine.

      Don't mess around with upgrading/downgrading. Use a backup program to save a copy of your curren

    • I get the impression from "Activation in Windows 10" [microsoft.com] that when you upgrade to Windows 10 or install Windows 10 with a Windows 7 product key during this offer, your digital entitlement is stored with Microsoft. So if you upgrade before the end of July, go back to Windows 7, and then reinstall Windows 10, it will access the same digital entitlement.

    • It might be possible. However it's a bit risky. You get all the pain from upgrading combined with all the pain of doing a rollback, and the chance that one of those steps will go wrong. To do a rollback would mean you need an in-place upgrade that leaves lots of junk leftover on the system rather than doing a clean installation. If it did work you'd have to keep that authorization code stored away and then re-apply it in the future.

      Things don't work the same way the used to. For instance, you can not j

  • With the end of the "Free update", does this mean the end of the festering nag screen of "Don't you want to update to Windows 10?" as well as any chance of it "accidentally" updating to Windows 10?

    • Re:question... (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 29, 2016 @10:34AM (#52413367)

      No. It will still upgrade to Windows 10 but then encrypt the hard disk until you pay for the upgrade.

      • No. It will still upgrade to Windows 10 but then encrypt the hard disk until you pay for the upgrade.

        Funny as hell!

        Crap, I can't mod up once I've replied to a story.

        I hate silly, pointless rules that exist just for the sake of having rules.

    • Microsoft says they will stop trying to push Windows 10 on you after July 29. That's what they say. Whether or not they are lying remains to be seen.

      • hehe It'd be just like them to continue to push it on everybody, but after its downloaded, it pops up a box asking for a credit card, and if you refuse, it soft-bricks your computer... Frankly I wouldn't put it past them.....

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Quirkz ( 1206400 )

          but after its downloaded, it pops up a box asking for a credit card, and if you refuse, it soft-bricks your computer...

          If you refuse, it just checks all cached web sites for any credit card details and runs it automatically, "for your convenience".

  • Meh (Score:3)

    by EndlessNameless ( 673105 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2016 @10:13AM (#52413185)

    Given its penetration, the Edge extensions hardly matter.

    Most of the other features are niche, invasive, or useless. Seriously, does anyone release malware that can't evade Windows Defender out of the box?

    Cortana will remain relatively useless until it can integrate with smartphones, which means Microsoft will have to put more effort into its Android and iOS apps, helping to make them first-class platforms.

    Anything that makes the Windows Store better sounds good. That's the only thing of real value I see, and even then it's more for the future than the present.

    • does anyone release malware that can't evade Windows Defender out of the box?

      Given Window Defenders wide spread usage, it would kind of be pointless to do so. Evading Windows Defender would be the minimum requirement for any new piece of malware.

      • does anyone release malware that can't evade Windows Defender out of the box?

        Given Window Defenders wide spread usage, it would kind of be pointless to do so. Evading Windows Defender would be the minimum requirement for any new piece of malware.

        No antivirus is capable of defending against zero-days, so it's a moot point to begin with. The Windows security model is fundamentally broken--probably on purpose, to fuel sales for the AV vendors.

    • I am excited to get a fully functional bash (Ubuntu) in Windows! You cannot deny that is pretty awesome... The year of desktop Linux indeed!

      • MEH, for sure!!
        If I want a bash shell, I *know* where to find it.. hint: It ISNT on an MS product!! I suppose for those poor schlubs who MUST use Windows (at work, or have to run pgms that Wine/Crossover won't do) it may be of *some* use, but jeeeebus, running a bash shell on Windows, is like towing a beat-up UHaul trailer behind a Ferrarri...

    • Is this the one that includes Bash?
    • The Windows Store is a complete cash grab. It offers no value. They don't even properly filter out malware. Also you may see your purchase disappear, because reasons. Microsoft has done it in the past, on and is still doing it!

      Taking these things into consideration, the only way to improve it, it to delete it off your system. It is a useless pile of garbage that has some fundamental design flaws. The biggest of which is that it is run by Microsoft and the biggest flaws in it Microsoft has no interest in p

      • I love how the MS Store is a cash grab... ok, I suppose you are right, but then so is Google Play store and Apple store...

        Anyway, the value I see in the store is universal Windows apps and games. Buy a game once on the app store and you can then play it on all Win10 platforms, including the xbox... that is certainly less cash grabby than forcing you to buy multiple copies...

        • Yes those are cash grabs too. That's the major flaw in Windows 10, in that it tries downgrade itself to being merely a smart phone OS. So lots and lots of apps available, but after browsing them it turns out there are only 2 or 3 apps worth ever getting for free and 0 apps worth paying for.

    • Seriously, does anyone release malware that can't evade Windows Defender out of the box?

      This is about the only thing I can find fault with in your post. Yes. Windows Defender catches plenty of things. It's about as good as any anti-virus which is significant because you can get rid of those bullshit programs which ironically slow down your system more than the alternative Microsoft offer.

      Past studies I've seen show Windows Defender on par or better than various products. Mind you the better then ones seem to use somewhat questionable methodology, but ultimately if you're relying on Anti-virus

  • Will there be an upgrade to LTSB release? The only version useable...

  • On The Fence re: Win10? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by tsqr ( 808554 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2016 @10:38AM (#52413399)

    I performed this procedure [ghacks.net] on an old Win7 netbook, and it worked out fine. Good way to take an objective look at Win10 without endangering your Win7 installation with a possibly irreversible update process.

    • It's still an upgrade in-place rather than a clean install. That is, it will try to migrate all your settings, applications, and so forth. Which is ok, but it will leave around a lot of junk and you never really get back to that new computer smell.

      I had a problem once where I screwed up the install by not exporting my files to a backup, so after wiping the primary partition and installing from scratch it ended up saying that all the files on the second partition were owned by an unknown user and couldn't

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tsqr ( 808554 )

        It's still an upgrade in-place rather than a clean install. That is, it will try to migrate all your settings, applications, and so forth. Which is ok, but it will leave around a lot of junk and you never really get back to that new computer smell.

        No, it's a clean install, but it has to start with a working instance of Win7. In my case, I copied gatherosstate.exe from the install DVD to the Win7 desktop, executed it, and copied the resulting GenuineTicket.xml to a thumb drive. I then installed a new hard drive in the computer, did a clean install from the DVD (skipping the license key entry by selecting "I don't have a license key" -- at least I think that's what it said. Something like that, anyway), then copied GenuineTicket.xml to the appropriate

  • "It will also mark the end of the one-year free Windows 10 update offer" So, now they'll bill you after forcing the upgrade?

  • It will also mark the end of the one-year free Windows 10 update offer for Windows 7 and Windows 8.x users.

    All I can say is "Good Riddance"... I lost count of the number of machines I've had to mess with because either the client DIDN'T WANT Windows 10 for one reason or another, OR the "malware" that *is* Windows 10, or "Windows NSA Edition" or my fav, Windows, the CTD (Computer-Transmitted Disease) managed to get installed, user was on the ball enough to initiate the "roll-back" to their previous version and 10 decided to shit the floor with their machine/data... I was soooo glad to hear of the lady who sued MS

  • Does that mean I can sell my six retail wiindows 7?

    The question is kind of rhetorical as I suspect not.

  • Only this week I replaced my laptop's 5400rpm hard drive (Windows 10) with an SSD running Debian.

    Sorry MS.

    Do you support booting off a USB2 drive yet, cos come August I couldn't be arsed getting the screwdriver out again.

  • So does that mean that after 08/02 windows will stop buggering me to upgrade to W10 ? If so, this is good news -- especially when you're running some *nix system !

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