Shortly after Windows 10 was released into the wild, my (grown-up) daughter started getting the nagware to upgrade her Win 8.1 laptop to Win 10. She's reasonably computer literate at a user level, but was aware of Microsoft's record on updates, so asked me to do it for her. The update went well enough, if slowly. There were a few niggles, but nothing un-fixable - but then I discovered that nearly all the available disk space had vanished!
A quick google revealed that this was not uncommon on machines with small-ish drives, and recommended a "clean" install once the various keys had been recovered. Another couple of hours passed whilst this process went on, and I handed my daughter a fully functioning Windows 10 install on her laptop, with adequate disk space left over.
All went fine for a couple of months, then I got a call: "The screen is blank!". Sure enough, once past the initial boot stage - about the time the Intel graphics driver kicked in - the screen went blank and stayed that way.
"Safe" mode showed a graphics driver update coincided with the problem, but no amount of rolling back would undo the damage!
A fresh install went fine until it came time to install the updates, when again the screen went un-recoverably blank! Nothing I tried would stop that b*****d upgrade from installing itself at the first opportunity, and borking the whole machine!
After several hours (again!) of fighting the system, I wiped the disk, installed Mageia 5 Linux, and the machine has been running happily ever since. Daughter couldn't tell the difference between LibreOffice and Microsoft Office, and was very impressed by how much quicker and more responsive her old laptop had become!
So that's another convert to Linux, thanks to Microsoft! Keep up the good work, Redmond! At this rate, Linux will soon be the dominant desktop system, thanks to your efforts!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
