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Microsoft Advertising Bug Businesses Operating Systems The Military Upgrades Windows

Microsoft Store Offers Free Laptop If They Can't Upgrade Your PC To Windows 10 (microsoft.com) 126

Posted by EditorDavid from the assuming-you'd-want-to dept.
Microsoft is now promising that their Microsoft Store employees "will give you a free Dell laptop if the staff can't do a same-day upgrade on your eligible PC by close of business," reports new Slashdot submitter Pritam Dash. To be eligible for the Dell Inspiron 15, the PC must meet Microsoft's upgrade requirements -- and be checked in by noon -- and in a further effort to boost adoption for their of the Windows 10 operating system, Microsoft is also announcing that "If your PC isn't compatible with Windows 10, we'll recycle it and give you $150 toward the purchase of a new PC." (This second offer is limited to PCs already running Windows 8). Both offers are valid until July 29th, "while supplies last."

Meanwhile, the U.S. army is "half a year behind the January 2017 deadline to adopt Windows 10 set by Defense Department Chief Information Officer Terry Halvorsen," and has hired Microsoft engineers to assess their 1.1 million devices and legacy systems.
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Microsoft Store Offers Free Laptop If They Can't Upgrade Your PC To Windows 10 More

Microsoft Store Offers Free Laptop If They Can't Upgrade Your PC To Windows 10

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  • The U.S.A. army? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If the U.S.A. army runs Windows 10 does that mean the other countries will be able to spy on them easily?

  • Darn, there goes my plan to trade in an old PowerBook or Centris. "Eligible" likely means one that can run Windows 10, so it's a guarantee they'll get it done same-day by close of business. So get in just before closing, but make sure the replacement Dell is comparable in features to the machine you brought in.

    • I had the same reaction. For a moment there I was regretting having thrown out my old 486 ... the one with the VESA Local Bus IDE hard disk controller and video card. Oh, and the two ISA slots. One had a 16-bit ATI TV tuner card stuck in it, and the other an esoteric 8-bit controller card for that Mars 105 black & white hand-held scanner I bought from a DAK [dak.com] catalog back in '89.

  • What could possibly go wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dster76 ( 877693 ) on Saturday July 16, 2016 @11:54AM (#52524443)
    http://www.pcworld.com/article... [pcworld.com]

    there’s no way to turn off some of the telemetry data Windows 10 collects about your system and beams back to the mothership. Microsoft executives don’t consider this a privacy issue. If you do, Windows 10 isn’t for you.

    Now let's put this on 1.1 million military systems.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Windows got retrofitted with this telemetry stuff via Windows Update. Not as if you could avoid it on any Windows PC now.

    • If the telemetry says only things like "10 days since last crash" or "browser was switched from Edge" then I struggle to see any privacy or security issues.

      If the telemetry is "this software was installed and these apps have crashed" then I certainly hope the IT managers are collecting this telemetry and it's up to them to figure a secure way to do it, maybe with Microsoft maybe without, as they see fit.

      If the telemetry is "this sequence of keystrokes was pressed" then there are obvious security and privacy

      • Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday July 16, 2016 @04:46PM (#52525541)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        Dude, shit, like compulsory upgrades. Don't rabbit it on about what it currently seems to do when that can change at any second and you have agreed to that change. Probe doesn't go deep enough, you have agreed to a longer probe, probe doesn't shake out enough data, you have agreed to have a vibrator added, probe doesn't see where it needs to see, you have agreed to a bend to the right and corkscrew if necessary. Windows anal probe 10, it is bad now and it will only get worse, much, much, worse. For nerds o

      • Keep in mind that consumer editions cannot go below Basic telemetry. The default is Enhanced, which includes more than the list below.

        From Microsoft directly (reformatted and edited for brevity since Slashdot hates multilevel lists):

        • Basic device data, including device attributes (such as camera resolution and display type)
        • Internet Explorer version
        • Battery attributes (such as capacity and type)
        • Networking attributes (such as number of network adapters, speed of network adapters, mobile operator network, and IM

    • So explain this to me. Office 2013 is a step back in usability for keyboard jockeys. There are things I cannot do without either using a mouse, or hitting TAB a bunch of times. And TAB doesn't go in any sensible order. And the whole OS is heading that way.

      Won't telemetry data help Microsoft figure out how people use things? When submitting a request via Connect.microsoft.com or whatever, they will actually have data that yes, people use it that way, and they should fix it.

      The super telemetry data is ov

    • The military systems that matter have no connectivity to the public internet.

      If internet-connected machines were a concern, the perimeter firewall could mitigate the issue entirely.

      The DoD runs its own WSUS repositories, so their servers and workstations would have no need to connect to Microsoft anyway.

  • NOT worth it! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 16, 2016 @12:00PM (#52524471)

    Either you lose a perfectly good PC and get a junk Dell that has Windows 10, or you have a perfectly good PC ruined by having Windows 10 installed!

    In what way is either of these better than having a PC that works well with Win 7 or better yet Linux on it?! Its NOT WORTH IT!! Just say NO!!!!!

  • Will the new laptop ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Saturday July 16, 2016 @12:17PM (#52524535)

    ... run Linux?

  • 1) Bring in old laptop sure to not be compatible
    2) Get free laptop
    3) Profit

  • Microsoft has gone into Gollum mode with Windows 10

    • Re:Creepy (Score:5, Interesting)

      by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Saturday July 16, 2016 @12:38PM (#52524639)

      Microsoft has gone into Gollum mode with Windows 10

      Nothing creepy at all . . . it's simple greed. The new Microsoft CEO, Satya Nutella, obviously has a bonus tied to Windows 10 installations.

      Just wait until December. Microsoft will be sending out folks to your home, to give you a free PC with Windows 10 installed on it. Just to boost the installation numbers over the goal line for Satya Nutella.

      That's the gag with Windows 10 Telemetry . . . Microsoft can always know how many PCs are running it. So Satya Nutella can't fudge the numbers.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Altrag ( 195300 )

        I'm sure Nadella is getting some bonuses cause CEO, but even aside from that there's plenty of (greedy) reasons for MS to want to push Windows 10:

        1) They get little to no revenue from upgrade installs at the best of time. The vast majority of people "upgrade" their Windows the day their PC dies and they have to buy a new one. So at the very least, they aren't losing much with the push.

        2) It saves them having to maintain Win7 and Win8. For some reason, MS still takes the flak for bugs in their system even

  • ...let me save you some time. Don't bother updating the laptop to Windows 10. It has driver compatibility issues [notebookreview.com] that cause the laptop to freeze minutes after you boot the machine.

    My mom has one, and I spent six hours over the 4th of July weekend trying to upgrade it. After a bunch of searching online, I came to the conclusion that some geeky workarounds like disabling the network port and using unsigned drivers was just not the right solution for mother. Instead, I just installed an SSD into the spare drive bay and installed a fresh copy of Windows 7. She says it runs like a brand new laptop. I figure that will buy her another two, maybe three years.

  • Headline: Microsoft offers free new laptop if your computer can't run Windows 10!

    "Will it run Linux?", getting out my pen knife......

  • So it does take day to succesfully install then? Or does this mean small business is supposed to close doors for a day to have upgrade, assuming its goes without problems like erasing your programs without permissions, messing your passwords, etc...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Altrag ( 195300 )

      I would hope that if you're running a business on the machine, small or otherwise, you have a better plan than waiting for MS to upgrade it for you, where you have no control over the process (and has a good chance of involving FORMAT C: if the upgrade install doesn't work first try.)

      I'm sure someone somewhere will do this and then get pissed off when "within a day" doesn't somehow magically mean "within 10 minutes" but lets hope that's not the majority. There will probably be far more people bitching that

  • I have a Intel Pentium Dual Core E2180 clone PC with a "VIA/S3 Unichrome Pro Integrated Video Adapter [BIOSTAR MICROTECH] 1106:3343" video adapter that looks like crap on Windows 10. Will it be covered by the Microsoft's upgrade requirements? Who knows?

  • I'm interested to see just how motivated Microsoft is to get everyone upgraded to Win 10. The pressure they've been putting on everyone to upgrade before August, when the free upgrades from 7 or 8 expire has been tough for a LOT of people to refuse. But it hasn't been all that realistic for corporate users.

    For example, where I work, we had all of our Windows users on Windows 7 Professional. We took a pass on Windows 8. Now, we're ok with making the move to Win 10, except the Microsoft upgrade process isn'

    • Our biggest problem with in place upgrades (other than drivers) was that they tend to toast roaming profiles. In the end we juat learned to delete the server and workstation copies of the profiles and start from scratch, and that largely seemed to fix it. All in all it has worked out reasonably well, though setting up the training lab computers was a real challenge, and even with mandatory profiles the Windows 10 start tiles (which are stored in the local app data store) seem to have a mind of their own. An

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by qubezz ( 520511 )
        If you really wanted win10 pre-activation locked in, you'd have some monkeys go around to each computer with SSDs and SATA cards using a win7 image with either OEM certificates or a bootloader hack and let it upgrade THAT to lock in the upgrade on Microsoft's servers. After doing that, you can push an image on them. Why would you though? There is literally ZERO reason to use Windows 10 in a business place, and tons of reasons not to.

        • The mentality that there's NO reason to upgrade to 10 in a business setting reminds me of the nay-sayers who never wanted to move off of Windows '98, back in the day. Sure, MS put out a lousy OS (Windows ME) as the next part of the upgrade path, just as Windows 8 was a pretty bad attempt at improving 7. But by the time XP came out, it made LOTS of sense to move to it.

          I think that's where we're at with Windows 10 now. What do we gain as a company from moving from 7 to 10?

          Off-hand:

          - Options for full disk encr

          • Cortana can be seen as a negative point. I am thinking of a situation like when you search for a document with an already sensitive title and Cortana sends a search to Bing server outside of your control. I particularly would not like that.

            Apart from that, some of your claims are doubtful at this point of time. Most applications do not take into account high DPI screens yet (too much baggage on the software side, not OS). I find it strange you are not outraged by the fact that new HW does not work with old

            • I find that annoying or irritating, sure ... but not to the point of outrage. In particular, the Surface Pro 4 is actually made by Microsoft, so why wouldn't they design it to help push their latest OS instead of encouraging people to stick with the older stuff they'd like to move away from? That's just good business logic from their perspective.

              (And really, it's no different than Apple's business model all along, as a provider of both the hardware and the OS.)

        • Primary reason is EOLs. Many of our workstations were running Vista, and it made no sense to hit 7 at this point. Yes, 10 has ample challenges and is a pain in the ass, but most the problems are dealt and we are now not facing a major upgrade for several years.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PRMan ( 959735 )
      Does this help: http://www.howtogeek.com/22434... [howtogeek.com]

  • So i can drop off all those machines, where clients request that upgrade, to that shop and they will do the work for me?

    And instead of getting badmouthed myself when the upgrade ain't possible, I'll get a free laptop to shut them up with?

    And I just have to temporarily buy the machine, Nice!

  • The solution's right there: Army drops off 1.1 million laptops at store before noon. Upgraded before 4pm.

    It's almost like even the /writer/ didn't RTFS.

  • The Windows 10 laptop is free but to use it, you have to allow it to send all your activity back to the mothership and the basic free apps require paying a yearly subscription to enable full functionality.

  • ... my old Cyrix 200+ with 75Mhz Motherboard running Windows 3.11 and DOS 5 around anymore. Dang, missed a free laptop. ...

    However; I do have my Sharp PC 1403 lying right here, strip-printer, datasette and all. I wonder it that counts. It *is* a PC - as in Pocket Computer - but a PC none-the-less. It's got kick-ass multimedia capabilities too - as you can see here [youtube.com]. I'd be impressed if they get Windows 10 running on that.

    But I'll also take the free Laptop, thank you.

  • Why make this offer? Just for publicity? Or could it be that many people have trouble upgrading and MS needs to counter the chatter by giving the press something? I've never heard of such an offer before.

  • PC that meets Window 10 upgrade requirements

    Ok so most old computers are outted.

    Devices must be running Windows 8 or newer

    Right, so basically if it can run Windows 8, it most likely can also run Windows 10

  • A free laptop or free disposal of your old plus $150 peeing on your foot toward a new one?

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