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One woman was so annoyed by the Windows 10 update, she sued — and won

Jon Martindale
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Windows 10
Bill Roberson/Digital Trends
Although we might still be a little confused about why most people haven’t updated to Windows 10 yet, there are certainly some cases where the change doesn’t make sense. Microsoft annoyed a lot of people recently when it made a few changes to its Windows 10 upgrade procedure, but perhaps no one as much as Teri Goldstein, who just won $10,000 in a courtroom after she sued Microsoft over the practice.

The instance that so aggravated Goldestein was when Microsoft changed how its upgrade panel worked. Traditionally hitting the red X in the corner would close the window down. While it still did that when Microsoft made its tweak, it also switched Windows 10 to a “recommended,” upgrade, which meant that closing that window down would begin the download and installation.

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It didn’t matter if you were in the middle of something important, or as is the case with Goldstein, that your PC wasn’t up to the task of running it. Following the unrequested upgrade, she found her system running very slowly and even grinding to a halt at times.

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She called Microsoft to complain, but when no remedy was found, she sued the tech giant. Amazingly, she walked away with $10,000 after taking on one of the world’s most powerful corporations.

That’s not to say that Microsoft threw the legal kitchen sink at her. It filed an appeal against the judgment, but dropped that a few weeks ago. While it did say in a statement that it still rejected the decision, it did not want to incur any more legal costs, according to Extremetech.

The bad PR that would have been generated from battling a lady in a courtroom is unlikely to have been worth it, either. Especially when there are just a few weeks left to grab the free upgrade for Windows 10. Microsoft is understandably keen to have everyone move over, so the last thing it needs to cap off a year where it has pushed upgrading on people is for it to appear even more insistent than it has so far.

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Jon Martindale
Jon Martindale
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