Microsoft has announced its intent to make the Windows 10 upgrade for existing Windows 7 and 8.1 users more widely available. In tandem with this, the company has also, at last, offered a good way of rejecting the upgrade and making the notifications about it go away forever.
The free upgrade is available to anyone not running an Enterprise version of Windows 7 or 8.1. Home users that update their systems through Windows Update have received a range of quite persistent advertisements in their system tray and the Windows Update app itself to encourage them to upgrade. However, domain-joined systems have so far been excluded from this advertising.
Microsoft is changing this imminently. Domain-joined eligible systems that use regular Windows Update for their updates (which is to say, systems that do not have their updates managed by WSUS or SCCM) will start receiving the upgrade offer in the US later this month and worldwide thereafter.
The upgrade notifications have annoyed many home users who, for whatever reason, do not want to upgrade. They'd surely be even more annoying to business users. Accordingly, Microsoft is, at last, offering a way to control the upgrade offer. Administrators can block upgrading through Windows Update and suppress the taskbar advertisement. Fresh installations of Windows 8.1 also offer to upgrade to Windows 10; Microsoft's instructions provide a way of disabling this, too.
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