Never10: Easily Control Automatic and Unwanted Windows 7 & 8.1 Upgrading to Windows 10

[euniqe]

On 3/30/2016 at 1:01 AM, Hunter259 said:

Every desktop I've have has had a complete heart attack from windows 10. It's a step backwards thats forced upon millions of people.

Then you're doing it wrong. 

 

for me, and millions of other people, it has been nothing but trouble-free.

[Michael McAllister]

On 3/30/2016 at 0:12 PM, samcool55 said:

GWX control panel does the same job, but doesn't look crap.

Quote

 . . . and why

The GWX Control Panel (an early popular solution at 2.4 megabytes) was a useful first step. But it was wrong in too many ways. Its design and operation seemed ill suited to the simple task of preventing upgrades to Windows 10. It was confusing and offered an array of actions, options and status reports, when all anyone really wanted was simply for Windows to not upgrade itself and to leave us alone. Instead, the GWX Control Panel makes itself the center of attention. It needs to be “installed”, is resident and persistent afterward, and it pops up all the time to tell us what a great job it's doing... which is exactly the kind of nonsense most people are fed up with in this era where “your attention” is what commercial interests all want to obtain more of. But more than anything, none of that was necessary . . .

 

Microsoft's Knowledgebase article 3080351 titled “How to manage Windows 10 notification and upgrade options” revealed that an available July 2015 update to Windows Update contained built-in provisions for disabling OS upgrades. This made it immediately clear that was the right way to solve this problem. So back on January 13th, 2016, I created a “bitly” shortcut to that Microsoft knowledgebase page (bit.ly/no-gwx) which explained how to do this, and began promoting that “correct,” minimal and sufficient way to disable Windows OS upgrading on my weekly Security Now! podcast.

 

The trouble was, Microsoft did not make this easy. In fact, it was down right user-hostile. It required using the Windows Group Policy editor, which is not even present on lower-end Windows editions which were eligible for OS upgrading. Or it required manually creating keys and values in the Windows registry, which is fraught with danger if the wrong button is pressed.

 

For several months I resisted the temptation to steal time from other projects to fix this. But the GWX Control Panel was so annoying that I finally removed it from the one Win7 machine it was “protecting.” And the final straw occurred when two non-computer-savvy friends were “upgraded” from Windows 7 against their wishes and became a bit hysterical over what had happened to the computer they had finally learned to use.

 

So, Never10 was born.

 

In testing the effects of using Microsoft's own documented “switch settings,” I was very impressed to discover that setting them to “disabled” would even cause the GWX subsystem to delete the 6 gigabytes of Windows 10 upgrade files it might have already pre-downloaded. This means that although Never10 does not explicitly remove that massive, sometimes-downloaded blob, it will cause the same agent that downloaded it to delete it, which is perfect.

 

There have been unsubstantiated and imprecise rumors of Windows upgrading even if users were using something to inhibit or prohibit that from happening. Some claimed that Microsoft was re-enabling something that was disabled. But we've never had any details. While it's certainly possible, my guess is that people were manually avoiding and “hiding” the evil 3035583 update titled: “Update installs Get Windows 10 app in Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 SP1”. The trouble is that “hiding” Windows updates is very soft protection. The Windows Update hiding system does not work reliably. Things that Microsoft wants you to have tend to reappear unbidden and they are very easy to miss.

 

This is why, unlike the GWX Control Panel, Never10 makes no attempt to prevent the GWX technologies from entering the user's system, nor of removing them if they are present. That's an uphill battle which requires vigilance and constant monitoring, and it's unnecessary. The GWX components occupy less than 32 megabytes in the /Windows/System32/GWX directory. You can go visit them if you're curious. So long as the proper registry settings are in place to hold them at bay and keep them disabled, they will cause no trouble and they occupy almost no storage space.

 

So, yes. Never10 is relying upon Microsoft to obey their own provided settings, which they created a special update to Windows Update to provide. And they buried those settings where no “regular user” would ever find them. Corporations the world over are relying upon those settings to prevent unwanted upgrading of their existing systems. There is just no chance that Microsoft would ever choose to deliberately bypass the express desire of their users by ignoring their own registry settings. It's not impossible, but it'll never happen.

 

[Michael McAllister]

OP updated to reflect new release.