I dunno if you’ve ever seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but I can’t help but compare the recent Windows 10 upgrade epidemic with the 1956 classic.
In it, the human race is slowly replaced with emotionless alien duplicates, much in the same way that our beloved Windows systems are randomly being upgraded to Windows 10 without our permission.
Well, one woman has decided to fight back. Teri Goldstein of Sausalito, California has sued Microsoft over the Windows 10 upgrade, and won $10,000 for her troubles.
The Seattle Times reports that the computer at Goldstein’s travel agency business tried to download the update without her consent. The update screwed up, which slowed her computer “to a crawl,”. It would often crash and become unusable for “days at a time” as a result.
Goldstein said:
I had never heard of Windows 10. Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to update.
After attempting (and failing) to go through Microsoft’s customer support department for a solution, she decided to take the company to court – Goldstein wanted compensation for lost wages, and enough to cover the cost of a new computer.
Goldstein won the case, and $10,000. Microsoft decided not to appeal, so as to “avoid the expense of further litigation” according to a representative for the company.
If you have a compatible device and fancy running the risk of screwing it up, you can still upgrade to Windows 10 for free before the 29 of July.
As of May 2016, Windows 10 had reached 300 million installs across all devices, including PC, Xbox One, and phones. It is coming for us all sooner or later.
Even the Xbox One is a Windows 10 device – November 2015’s New Xbox One Experience update slipped it in as the console’s operating system.
We’d do well to remember stories like this. It’ll be good morale for us to tell tales of how the humans used to fight back, once our Windows 10 overlords rise up and enslave humanity.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.