Microsoft announces free Windows 10 upgrade offer will stop on 29 July
On the plus side, those annoying 'upgrade to Windows 10' notifications might soon be a thing of the past
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Your support makes all the difference.Microsoft has announced it is halting its free Windows 10 upgrade offer - possibly meaning an imminent end to those annoying notifications and surprise updates.
Writing on the company's official blog, Windows vice president Yusuf Mehdi said the free upgrade offer will end on 29 July.
After that, users in the UK will have to pay £99 for Windows 10, although it'll come installed as standard on new devices.
While Windows 10 has got great reviews (Microsoft says it has the highest customers satisfaction of any version of Windows), the company's constant nagging to get users to upgrade has been criticised.
Users have complained that their PCs have shut down and upgraded to the new operating system unexpectedly, sometimes interrupting important work and making their computers unusable for hours.
On a Reddit thread about the unwanted upgrades, one user wrote: "This actually happened to my wife. Guess what she was doing? Trying to finish a midterm project that was due and she got up to do something, came back to find her computer in the middle of the update. No warning, no confirmation, nothing."
The difficulties seem to have started when Microsoft reclassified the Windows 10 update from 'optional' to 'recommended'.
Most people using earlier versions of Windows have their computers set to automatically install 'recommended' updates by default, possibly explaining why the Windows 10 upgrade took so many of them by surprise. Microsoft have insisted that updates do not take place without the user consenting to them.
So, while those 'Get Windows 10' notifications may finally disappear from your computer, you'll soon have to pay to upgrade. If you're interested in updating your PC before the offer ends, you can do it via Microsoft's website.
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