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@Woody, @Ed:

Sorry guys, I wasn’t trying to sell you on blindly using Win10wiwi, I just wanted to share the discovery and my experiences with it.

For what it’s worth, neither my BitDefender nor MalwareBytes AntiMalware detected any issues with the executable file for this tool. Furthermore, the VirusTotal potential problem score was just 1/56, so I think it’s safe from that standpoint.

I have checked all of the computers on which I installed Win10wiwi for suspicious disk or internet activity, and there has been none, at least so far.

According to both my WinPatrol monitor and my own visual checking, there were also no changes made to my registry, Task scheduler or installed services to accomodate this software, and no hidden files or folders left behind, just the downloaded executable file itself.

All that being said, I don’t know the company behind this either, but from what I can see they are software and technology consultants and developers, headquartered in Paris, France. Their principal officer is a gentleman named Yves Gattegno who has been in this business for a long time, worked for Hewlett Packard in France, and led a team that developed and patented some virutal disk technologies while he was there, and has gone on to invent and patent several other things since.

While that still doesn’t tell me if I can completely trust his company or his software, to this point it has done exactly what it claimed to do on my computers without harm and with no strings attached. And frankly, that’s way more than Microsoft has done lately.

Just thought I’d clear that up.

Woody: I stumbled across another 3rd party tool that seems to be rather effective at keeping the Win 10 upgrade patches in check, along with the tracking patches that are being added to Windows and 8.1.

It’s called Win10 when i want it (win10wiwi)and it’s found here: http://win10wiwi.com/

I tested it on 3 different computers on which I also installed GWX Control Panel.

I thought I had done a good job of keeping all of these patches off of my computers, but I still missed somethings.

On my Win 7 Home Premium SP1 x64 desktop, I ran GWXCP first, and found that the OS upgrade switch was turned on. I remedied that immediately, rebooted, and then ran Win10wiwi. Much to my surprise, it found 2 patches that I had forgotten to uninstall. It promptly uninstalled both and hid them, and a reboot showed no new updates available.

Moving on to my Win 8.1 Pro 32-bit desktop, I ran Win10wiwi first, and it found 2 patches that needed to be removed. After rebooting, I ran GWXCP and found nothing else that needed to be dealt with.

Finally, I ran GWXCP and then Win10wiwi on my Win 8.1 x64 laptop, using the first to disable the OS upgrade switch, and the second to remove one other patch I had failed to remove myself.

All in all, Win10wiwi seems to complement GWXCP rather well, and the combination of the two makes taking care of all of this silliness much more automated and far less annoying.

At least Microsoft reissues all this crap again … and again … and again …

Woody: According to this article http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/windows-10-upgrade-installing-automatically-on-some-windows-7-8-systems/ Microsoft had admitted to this problem, calling it a “mistake”… But the more they continue to push Windows 10, the more difficulty I have believing anything they say anymore.

Can’t count the number of times I’ve refused/hidden these updates already… And there seems to be no end to this nagging in sight! I guess my transition away from all things Microsoft to the world of Linux is going to happen much earlier than I expected.