Simple way to stop unwanted "upgrade" to Windows 10 behind your back

[Brooke]

Sneaky, unwanted "upgrades" of people's computers to Windows 10 are -- amazingly -- getting even worse.

The latest is a dialog box that will schedule your computer for upgrading even if you click the red "X" box in the upper right.

There is a little application by Gibson Research (a very reputable outfit) called "never10" that will disable upgrading to Windows 10 in a safe manner and allow you to reverse the decision later if you so choose.  It just sets all the settings to disallow the update and deletes the Windows 10 preparatory files that were sneakily downloaded probably without your even knowing it.  If you want to change all the settings back to allowing Windows 10 upgrade, it will do that, too.  It requires one button click to accomplish either choice -- so nice and easy.

Here is where you get it:

https://www.grc.com/never10.htm

At home and at my company, we have previously set things manually to preclude Windows 10, but with increased underhanded activity going on, I decided to run never10 on my home computer, and it found things that I missed doing it manually.  Tomorrow, I am having never10 run on all computers in the company, including our mission-critical computers that run our production equipment.  I might also send out a suggestion to customers to run it on computers that run the equipment they purchased from us.

[Chalenge]

Steve Gibson! Awesome guy. I've been using his SpinRite for years now.

[Brooke]

Steve Gibson! Awesome guy. I've been using his SpinRite for years now.

Yeah, I love that guy, too.  He's done some things that have been very useful to me:  Shields Up since back in the earliest days of firewalls, keeping the latest version of TrueCrypt available to the world, as well as informing folks about the true status of that project before the founders were sort of forced out of it, and now never10. 

[Bizman]

Thanks Brooke!

On my computer it said there's some 6,500 bytes of Win10 data in 8 files & folders. What I found a little distracting is that it didn't tell which and where they are. However, knowing the quality of Gibson's other programs, I felt safe to remove them.

[Skuzzy]

I added that to my "Hints and Tips post as well.

[Drano]

Cool! I've avoided doing any updates for a while because my almost total lack of PC time lately hasn't allowed me time for doing all the homework needed to pick out the unscrupulous ones. And that's like zapping the borg with your phaser! Won't work long! This oughta help! There hasn't been a single thing I've heard about Win10 that I'd touch with a thirty-nine and a half inch pole. YMMV.

Sent from my XT1585 using Tapatalk

[darkzking]

[Brooke]

Thanks Brooke!

On my computer it said there's some 6,500 bytes of Win10 data in 8 files & folders. What I found a little distracting is that it didn't tell which and where they are. However, knowing the quality of Gibson's other programs, I felt safe to remove them.

On some of our machines, it was more than 5 GB of stuff and more than 15,000 files.  One machine was more than 20,000 files and 7 GB of stuff.

The program doesn't list them, but in the web page for never10, Gibson says that the files are in a hidden directory created by gwx.exe.

[Beefcake]

How safe is this to use?

[guncrasher]

I had zero files.  been following skuzzy's instructions since day one  .


semp

[Brooke]

How safe is this to use?

Very safe.

[AKQwik]

I used it on two computers, works great and fast.  Now I don't need to watch for the dreaded KB3035583.

[terrydew]

Thank you Brooke. The nag is gone.

Terry

[morfiend]

Thx Brooke,

  My wife's laptop upgraded on the weekend,I managed to roll it back but I couldnt get rid of the upgrade notice.

   The link you provided did the trick and remove an incredible amount of junk that win 10 left behind. Next thing you know they'll want to move the OS to a cloud and you wont be able to use your comp without accessing the clouds.... I think it should be called Gategate........


 again thx!



   

[Condor]

Thanks Brooke

My AH system is windows 7 ultimate and I have never seen the nagware that I've seen on my other win 7 computers so I thought I was safe. I ran this utility and got the message that windows 10 upgrade was enabled on the system. It's not now. So if any of you are not seeing the nagware run this anyway. you may be surprised as I was.