Family Historian User Group

If you don't want to upgrade to Window 10 yet, remember that you have until 29th July 2016 to get the free upgrade, and are fed up with all of the nagging pop ups from Microsoft to do the upgrade (which will get worse), there is now a free well proven "blocker" for these nags that is being used by a lot of techie people.

It's called GWX Control Panel and available here from the authors website (don't get it from anywhere else, some download sites package "junk" with it):

http://blog.ultimateoutsider.com/2015/0 ... emove.html

If you want to check out reviews for it first just Google GWX Control Panel review

I have no association with the author, I've just been using his program for a couple of months now.

Yes, that is in glossary:windows_10_upgrade_tips|> Windows 10 Upgrade Tips and I have used it and recommended it to our computer club members.

We are advising they postpone upgrading until later in the year, especially if currently on Windows 7, because that has less to gain from the new Start Menu than Windows 8.1 and will probably be running on older hardware that manufacturers may need a while longer to update drivers.

I came across references to GWX Control Panel when googling to try and fix Windows Update alerts which had disappeared from the task bar on Win7 a few months ago. For that, an alternative to GWX is to enable a setting in the PC's Local Security Policy but obviously that's slightly more technical than using GWX but works the same. I've now got the alerts back again. From what I've read MS decided it would be too confusing for people to leave the Windows Update alerts available via the task bar as well as any alerts for Win10. It didn't stop you getting windows updates, just you had to remember to access Windows Update via Control Panel.

I have noticed that there are an increasing number of Win10 related items in Windows Update (on my W7 PC) in the monthly update cycle (usually 2nd Tuesday in the month). Some of these are repeats of previous "Upgrade to W10" updates to catch people who deleted them first time around, some are "to make the W10 upgrade smoother" and some are adding more telemetry into W7 (8 and 8.1) to tell Microsoft what you're doing with your computer.

There's a big row going on between big companies and Microsoft about this "spyware", and at the moment Russia have banned W10 (but I bet their techies are tearing it apart to see what's in there)!