I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature: The 'Get Windows 10' notification area icon

As the great Raymond Chen once wrote:

I often find myself saying, “I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature.”

“That feature” is something aggressively user-hostile, like forcing a shortcut into the Quick Launch bar or the Favorites menu, like automatically turning on a taskbar toolbar, like adding an icon to the notification area that conveys no useful information but merely adds to the clutter, or (my favorite) like adding an extra item to the desktop context menu that takes several seconds to initialize and gives the user the ability to change some obscure feature of their video card.

The ‘Get Windows 10’ application that Microsoft deployed to Windows 7 and 8.1 machines earlier this year as a recommended – not even optional – update (KB3035583) sure fits this bill.

In short, every eligible Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 user ends up with this icon in their notification area: Get Windows 10 Icon

Apart from looking fairly ugly (that top edge in particular is a blurry mess), there’s no way to close it even temporarily, short of killing GWX.exe in the Task Manager – note also that no-one thought to give it a descriptive name; it’s just ‘GWX’.

I understand Microsoft’s desire to have users promptly upgrade to Windows 10 (even if I wish they would delay its release by a year or so), but this kind of approach just destroys goodwill.

Fixing error 0xC190010C when attempting to update the Windows 10 Technical Preview

My Hyper-V virtual machine running the Windows 10 Technical Preview kept displaying the error code 0xC190010C when I attempted to update to the latest build (from 9841 to 9860).

I was able to resolve this issue by clearing the Windows Update cache as described here. Briefly:

net stop wuauserv
rmdir /s %WinDir%\SoftwareDistribution
net start wuauserv

Windows Update Notification Tool for Windows 8

I was apparently part of the 5.82% of Windows 7 users who preferred to be notified about updates rather than have them installed automatically. Annoyingly, Windows 8 no longer displays the familiar balloon tip and notify icon when new updates are available, instead placing a notice on the lock screen (which I almost never have occasion to see on my desktop). I found this frustrating enough that I decided to write a small unmanaged program to mimic the basic functionality of the old notify icon. It also supports automatic installation of specified updates (identified by their Knowledge Base ID – I use this to install Windows Defender definition updates). You can find out more and download the tool here:

Windows Update Notification Tool