Windows 10 Start menu starts showing suggested apps

A few Windows 7 and 8.1 users are finding themselves unable to ignore Windows 10’s installation prompts any longer.

For one year, Microsoft is offering free Windows 10 upgrades to Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users – one of many strategies the company is employing to achieve its goal of 1 billion devices running Windows 10 “in two to three years.” What’s more, no other updates are displayed for the time being, so unless you install Windows 10, you can’t do much else in Windows Update. It seems Microsoft is making it harder for users to opt out of upgrading.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of users who might be impacted by this change, so we’ve reached out to Microsoft to see if they’re indeed forcing the Windows 10 upgrade and will update the article should we receive an answer. Ars Technica’s Peter Bright witnessed the scenario playing out for himself, observing that the “Upgrade to Windows 10” optional update in Windows Update had been checked by default – and unless a user specifically viewed the Optional Updates tab before clicking “OK”, they wouldn’t realize that they’d inadvertently given the thumbs-up to proceed with the upgrade.

Previously, there was a way to opt-out of and, ultimately, ignore Windows 10’s constant notifications by using Josh Mayfield’s GWX Control Panel program. “In the recent Windows update, this option was checked as default; this was a mistake and we are removing Windows 10 from Windows Update for users that have not reserved a copy of Windows 10”. We’ve received a number of reports that people’s systems are not merely downloading the installer but actually starting it up.

There’s nothing that definitively confirms that this is Microsoft’s doing, however, but the company’s latest OS is now enjoying over 110 million installs.