This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this folio. Terms of apply.

Windows 10 Final

Microsoft has taken a great deal of flak over the last 14 months for the various decisions it fabricated when rolling out Windows 10. From increasingly pushy upgrade offers, and default program resets to ongoing problems with the Windows Shop and the quality of the PC titles offered there, Windows ten's path to 400 million users wasn't an like shooting fish in a barrel 1.

Now, Microsoft has made changes to the Anniversary Update that may roll back some of your previously preferred settings, according to PC Earth. Brad Chacos writes:

It's no hole-and-corner that Windows ten'southward stuffed with revenue-generating hooks for Microsoft, but I find the idea of a paid-for operating organization shoving straight-upwards ads in my confront distasteful, and disabled the Get Office ads and every other ad-related setting months agone. After a chip of poking and prodding, I discovered that beyond reinstalling the Get Office app that surfaces those notifications, the Anniversary Update as well re-enabled Start menu and lock screen ads, essentially tossing my explicit choice to disable them out the window. And it did and so without consent or even a notice that these changes were happening in the background.

Other readers chimed in with their own bug, including updated bootloaders that utilise Windows x by default on a 5-second timer, problems with using a Pivot to log in after the update was finished, and the already well-discussed problems with webcams, Amazon'due south Kindle, and some pregnant PowerShell bugs. These problems may exist rooted in Microsoft's determination to fire about of its QA staff and require its ain programmers to fill up that office instead. The decision to change advertizing preferences, on the other mitt, has become something of a Microsoft tradition.

You can prevent ads by going to Settings / Personalization / Start and turning off "Occasionally show suggests in Start."

You can forestall ads past going to Settings / Personalization / Start and turning off "Occasionally show suggests in Start."

My own Anniversary Update didn't encounter this problem, but I had made some edits to my ain system configuration via gpedit.msc prior to updating and am using Windows 10 Pro instead of the more common Home version. Our ain Editor-in-Chief Jamie Lendino wasn't exactly thrilled with the terminal product, and Microsoft has been dinged multiple times for how it handles upgrades, defaults, and updates — last year, one of the company'southward updates removed multiple programs erroneously considering it misidentified them equally causing problems. Every time Microsoft pushes a major update, I have to once once again tell the operating arrangement that no, I don't desire to use buggy, problem-ridden Border as my default browser (Edge may save battery life, only it's far from perfectly compatible with many websites).

More generally, I concur with Chacos that Microsoft's new attitude on these topics is extremely off-putting. The company may be trying to convince users to try new features and applications within the Windows Shop, but people who've already turned those features off aren't going to exist pleased to come across them flipped back on. At the same fourth dimension, I don't have an piece of cake solution to Microsoft's full general usability problem. The Windows Store will remain a fated ruin unless Redmond tin can spur developers to write useful apps — and developers aren't by and large interested in writing and maintaining useful apps if no 1 is going to show up to use them.

For more information on privacy and Windows 10, be sure to bank check our detailed privacy guide.

Or read: Windows 10: The best hidden features, tips, and tricks