Pirates Can Legitimately Upgrade To Windows 10 For Free

[lacktheknack]

Well, that's ominous.

Any thoughts I had of free upgrades are now delayed for about a year. I don't trust free. Free is bad.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

I doubt this, but even if it's true, I think Microsoft would be pretty justified. If people pirate their software, and then push their luck by trying to get a free software upgrade from the very company they've stolen from, it seems like Microsoft is well in their right to be dicks towards them.

Microsoft has irrefutable proof that China is full of pirates, then what? Yeah they could sue, but then China would lock them out of the slave labour armies.

 

[MHR]

I'm going to have to go with Admiral Akbar on this. Something don't smell right. Screw Windows 10.

 

[iller3]

dafuq

Oh there definitely has to be a catch here somewhere. And I wish I HAD pirated win7 instead of getting this **** awful win 8.1 at full price from a local store. It's been a complete nightmare of stupid NOT-WINDOWS type controls and these homoerotic little square things called "apps". I still don't understand what the point of them is and I installed Classic Shell the first chance I got, but if windows10 also has them, then **** that noise too

 

[toms]

Lots of foil hats in here.
There is nothing particularly strange about this at all.
Microsoft doesn't make much money from consumer market but they want to keep the market share nevertheless. They make their money from their enterprise products.
If all of your employees already know how to use Windows and MS Office, then it makes more sense for you to purchase licenses for those rather than retrain your people to use something else.
So chill out. This is not about 'muh warez', nobody cares.

Same reason why Adobe doesn't crack down on Photoshop piracy as hard as they could. Everyone pirates Photoshop for personal use. But this means that everyone knows Photoshop, all tutorials are for Photoshop and if you want to work professionally, you'll be buying Photoshop.

 

[Strazdas]

I wonder if it will update to my Enterprice version for free or is that only for the unusable "home edition"?

Its like that fool I saw who missed Doctor Who special and said "Oh well, I will just torrent". ITS ON IPLAYER FOR FREE, STUPID!!!

He may have torrented it for 2 reasons:

1. He did not/could not deal with stupidity of "IPLAYER"

2. torrents have better quality.

Why is MS so horny to give out Win10 for free? What about Win10 is going to make people "realize the value of properly licensing Windows"? After all, my priate-friends Windows are Licensed, just not properly.

Is this going to contain "snitch-DRM"?
Am I, er... are they going to get pop-up ads periodically interrupting my, ahem... their gaming-sessions?
How much privacy can we actually expect, and when are we going to hear "What did you expect, you got the OS for free... We had to make money somehow," not that I have ever expected a modicum of privacy from MS products, that is.

Market share and catch. Windows is not a money maker for MS, its all the products that rely on windows that is. if you get 10% market share of windows users you are going to sell more copies of office, lightbeam and other stuff.

Also there had to be a catch, such as advertisement placement in windows or something. they already tried to trick people into making online accounts where you cant even login without being connected to the internet. they might disable local accounts completely and tie you to always online DRM.

As far as populs go MS products had the least of them lately, which is surprisingly nice.

Microsoft can't even tell the difference between legitimate and illegitimate copies. I've seen the whole "your copy of Windows is not genuine" thing so many times on multiple PCs, all running genuine Windows.

According to Arstechnia, around 13% of detected pirated copies are false positives. thats a horrifyingly high number.

Ah, Microsoft doing something non-dickish again? Of course everyone's going to assume, without evidence, that they must have a nefarious motive underlying it to screw us all.

Same thing would happend if Ubisoft or EA did it. when you have a history of dicking your costumers over for decades, they tend not to trust you.

 

[Parasondox]

Its like that fool I saw who missed Doctor Who special and said "Oh well, I will just torrent". ITS ON IPLAYER FOR FREE, STUPID!!!

He may have torrented it for 2 reasons:

1. He did not/could not deal with stupidity of "IPLAYER"

2. torrents have better quality.

Iplayer is not difficult to use and secondly they have it in HD. What better quality does he want? 4K.

 

[Zhit]

Its like that fool I saw who missed Doctor Who special and said "Oh well, I will just torrent". ITS ON IPLAYER FOR FREE, STUPID!!!

He may have torrented it for 2 reasons:

1. He did not/could not deal with stupidity of "IPLAYER"

2. torrents have better quality.

Iplayer is not difficult to use and secondly they have it in HD. What better quality does he want? 4K.

On the flip side--I can't wrap my head around folks willing to install a myriad of specialized players to view content. Personally, I prefer my media local and in my control.

 

[Savryc]

Its like that fool I saw who missed Doctor Who special and said "Oh well, I will just torrent". ITS ON IPLAYER FOR FREE, STUPID!!!

He may have torrented it for 2 reasons:

1. He did not/could not deal with stupidity of "IPLAYER"

2. torrents have better quality.

Iplayer is not difficult to use and secondly they have it in HD. What better quality does he want? 4K.

But the BBC is the man, man! You can't trust the man! Cuz freedom!

 

[LordLundar]

I always thought the idea behind the upgraded version was that it rewarded previous users of Windows and that it could not be installed on a new system (without a previous Windows product key).

Can't speak for W8, but up to at least XP the installer would check for certain files to verify if there was previous version installed, if not it would ask for a Cd Key. W7 upgrade however requires the previous install located on the computer. I use a small drive with XP on it to serve the role and install W7 on my main drive. Once the install finishes I shut down the system and remove the XP install drive.

And yeah, between all the talk of Windows being a service, the "Windows Gaming" statements a couple weeks back and now this I suspect W10 official release is going to be some always on always reporting junk.

 

[WeepingAngels]

I always thought the idea behind the upgraded version was that it rewarded previous users of Windows and that it could not be installed on a new system (without a previous Windows product key).

Can't speak for W8, but up to at least XP the installer would check for certain files to verify if there was previous version installed, if not it would ask for a Cd Key. W7 upgrade however requires the previous install located on the computer. I use a small drive with XP on it to serve the role and install W7 on my main drive. Once the install finishes I shut down the system and remove the XP install drive.

And yeah, between all the talk of Windows being a service, the "Windows Gaming" statements a couple weeks back and now this I suspect W10 official release is going to be some always on always reporting junk.

I had a retail upgrade copy of XP (still have it somewhere). When I would reinstall, I would do it from DOS and the wizard would see the previous version and then let me do a clean install, always the best way to go.

 

[Parasondox]

Its like that fool I saw who missed Doctor Who special and said "Oh well, I will just torrent". ITS ON IPLAYER FOR FREE, STUPID!!!

He may have torrented it for 2 reasons:

1. He did not/could not deal with stupidity of "IPLAYER"

2. torrents have better quality.

Iplayer is not difficult to use and secondly they have it in HD. What better quality does he want? 4K.

But the BBC is the man, man! You can't trust the man! Cuz freedom!

Are these the same people that really really hate Sky because "They get all the best programmes while we are stuck with The Voice, Eastenders, X-Factor, and Cash in the Attic"?

 

[Nemu]

Eeeeehhhhh, no thanks. I'm still running 7 with no problems and I, too, am cynical enough to not trust this "free offer".

I distrust it so much, I'm not even willing to say that it is a nice gesture.

 

[alj]

Well this is indeed interesting, possibly Microsoft now understand that you are not going to beat piracy, and that its not a matter of cost but a matter of service. Its better to have as many people up to date to be able to sell them apps via windows store and so on. The more people they can expose to the app store the better the less time they have to spend supporting an old OS the better so they can cut off the older versions faster. This is exactly what apple have done with OSX (OSX is free now), yet older versions drop off more quickly.

Don't get me wrong i am still not the biggest fan of windows and as you should with ANYTHING ( that include games by the way) you would wait a week or so to see what problems arise.

Don't forget there will be different versions of windows 10 , i would expect the pirates to get the lowest version for there architecture where the rest of us get like for like.

 

[Bad Jim]

Its like that fool I saw who missed Doctor Who special and said "Oh well, I will just torrent". ITS ON IPLAYER FOR FREE, STUPID!!!

He may have torrented it for 2 reasons:

1. He did not/could not deal with stupidity of "IPLAYER"

2. torrents have better quality.

Iplayer is not difficult to use and secondly they have it in HD. What better quality does he want? 4K.

On the flip side--I can't wrap my head around folks willing to install a myriad of specialized players to view content. Personally, I prefer my media local and in my control.

BBC IPlayer is just a website. You just go to it and select the program you want to watch. And it plays in your browser like Youtube. You don't have to install anything weird, though I think you have to live in the UK.

 

[Holythirteen]

Jeeze, I wish they'd let me upgrade from Vista for free. I misplaced the disks that came with my laptop and its in desperate need of reformatting...

I think you can still get digital versions of the discs from microsoft, and there is a program that could extract your licence key, I did this for a laptop with win7, and I'm pretty sure winvista was also available.

Man, is microsoft getting desperate or what?

BTW: try "jellybean key finder"

Edit: Okay, they made some changes, or maybe vista isn't available to download anymore, but you might as well extract your cd-key just in case.

 

[toms]

There has been an update to this. If you upgrade a "non-geniune" Win 7 or 8, you'll get a "non-genuine" win 10. So you don't actually get a legitimate copy.

 

[JemothSkarii]

Cute, Windows 10 could dispense pretzels and double as a real life G.E.C.K and I still wouldn't upgrade to it. Windows 7 is stable enough, and this whole Cortana thing feels way too... weird to me. Plus Windows 8. Fool me twice Microsoft.

 

[Strazdas]

Its like that fool I saw who missed Doctor Who special and said "Oh well, I will just torrent". ITS ON IPLAYER FOR FREE, STUPID!!!

He may have torrented it for 2 reasons:

1. He did not/could not deal with stupidity of "IPLAYER"

2. torrents have better quality.

Iplayer is not difficult to use and secondly they have it in HD. What better quality does he want? 4K.

Some people think iTunes is not difficult to use, for others its hell reincarnated. he may not agree about iPlayers difficulty.

Neither HD nor 4k is a measure of quality. it is a measure of resolution. the two are NOT the same thing. While not perfect, nowadays bitrate is a close measure to quality. To give you an example - Netflix streams at 10.000 kbps when in 1080p mode, meanwhile Bluerays are encoded in 30.000-40.000 kbps - more than 3 times the quality of the image. In general, streaming services usually have horrible quality.

 

[FalloutJack]

Beware pirates! Something fishy will probably happen!

I see what you did thar, and agree. This smells of Suspiciously Specific Denial here. And if Topaz is right at all, I'd be all the more suspicious of Window 10's features and performance, overall.