Well it has been 6 months since Microsoft released the current version of Windows, Windows10 out to the general public. Until at least July 31, 2016 it is a free upgrade for those of you who are using non enterprise versions of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. Microsoft has indicated that only 200 million active users. I had posted about the various ways of performing the upgrade here. Until recently the upgrade was optional in that you, the end user had a say if and when the upgrade would occur. Albeit Microsoft would install a little white icon in your taskbar and download approximately 3 to 4 GB of files behind the scenes. That was fine if your ISP does not have bandwidth caps that are somewhat on the skimpy side of things. These files were there so if you so choose to install the optional upgrade to Windows 10 that the process could proceed right away without you having to wait for the download to finish.
Well that is fine however there have been reports of people not authorizing the upgrade to Windows 10 yet they discovered that their machine had been upgraded on its own. For the most part these upgrades went without a hitch. However some people after trying Windows 10 for a while decided to revert back to their prior version of Windows only to discover that the rollback option within the first 30 days of having installed the upgrade of Windows 10 did not work properly. This necessitated the end user backing up their data, reformatting their hard drive and reinstalling their prior Windows version plus all of the critical updates and applications plus restoring their backed up data. Not a pleasant task to say the least.
Microsoft supposedly has received feedback from their end users who said they wanted the upgrade process to be simplified even more. To this end Microsoft has decided that instead of having Windows 10 upgrade marked as optional that they instead would have it changed to recommended. What this means is that the majority of end users on Windows7 and Windows 8.1 who have not changed their Windows update settings from the initial configuration, will see a prompt for upgrading their computer to Windows 10. Apparently the upgrade process will still require the end user to authorize it. If you do not authorize it then apparently your computer should remain with your current version of Windows.
If you want to disable the free upgrade and feeling adventureous see this article there is also a free tool called GWX Control Panel which offers fine control over what facets of the Windows 10 upgrade application is allowed to run on your system.
As with any computer system CURRENT backups are always a good idea. These backups can take the form of a complete system image via commerical products such as Acronis True Image or Macrium Reflect (free and paid versions). There is also the automatic online cloud based backups for your critical irreplaceable data that does not require end user intervention.