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7 (or 8.1) login screen.

      5 Click the user you want to use and enter the password.You’re ready to go with your old Windows version.

      

In the Windows 10 May 2020 update, I found that Windows 10 no longer asks users whether they want to keep their files and apps during the rollback. The rollback process automatically restores apps (programs) and settings to their original state and settings (the ones that existed when you upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10). Any modifications made to those programs (for example, installing security updates to Office programs) while using Windows 10 are not applied when you return to Windows 7; you have to apply them again.

      On the other hand, changes made to your regular files while working in Windows 10 — edits made to Office documents, for example, or to new files created while working with Windows 10 — may or may not make it back to Windows 7. I had no problems with files stored in My Documents; edits made to those documents persisted when Windows 10 rolled back to Windows 7. But files stored in other locations (specifically, in the \Public\Documents folder or on the desktop) didn’t always make it back: Sometimes, Word documents created in Windows 10 disappeared when rolling back to Windows 7, even though they were on the desktop or in the Public Documents folder.

One oddity may prove useful: If you upgrade to Windows 10, create or edit documents in a strange location, and then roll back to Windows 7 (or 8.1), those documents may not make the transition. Amazingly, if you then upgrade again to Windows 10, the documents may reappear. You can retrieve the “lost” documents, stick them in a convenient place (such as on a USB drive or in the cloud), roll back to Windows 7, and pull the files back again.

      Important lesson: Back up your data files before you revert to an earlier version of Windows.

      If you can’t get Windows to roll back and detest Windows 10, you’re up against a tough choice. The only option I’ve found that works reliably is to reinstall the original version of Windows from scratch. On some machines, the old recovery partition still exists. You can bring back your old version of Windows by going through the standard recovery partition technique (which varies from manufacturer to manufacturer), commonly called a factory restore. More frequently, you get to start all over with a fresh install of Windows 7 or Windows 8.1.

A Brief History of Windows 10

      So you’ve decided to stick with Windows 10? Good.

      Pardon me while I rant for a bit.

      Microsoft darn near killed Windows — and most of the PC industry — with the abomination that was Windows 8. Granted, there were other forces at work — the ascendancy of mobile computing, touchscreens, faster cheaper and smaller hardware, better Apple devices, Android, and other competition — but to my mind, the number one factor in the demise of Windows was Windows 8.

      

We saw PC sales drop. After Windows XP owners replaced their machines in a big wave in late 2014 and early 2015, responding to the end of support for Windows XP, we saw PC sales drop even more. Precipitously. Steve Ballmer confidently predicted that Microsoft would ship 400 million machines with Windows 8 preinstalled in the year that followed Windows 8’s release. The actual number was closer to a quarter of that. Normal people like you and me went to great lengths to avoid Windows 8, settling on Windows 7.

Windows 8.1, which arrived a nail-biting year after Windows 8, improved the situation a bit, primarily by not forcing people to boot to the tiled Metro Start screen.

      The team inside Microsoft that brought us the wonderful forced Windows 8 Metro experience was also responsible, earlier, for the Office ribbon. Many of us old-timers grumbled about the ribbon, saying Microsoft should at least present an alternative for using the older menu interface. It never happened. Office 2007 shipped with an early ribbon, and subsequent versions have been even more ribbon-ified since. Here’s the key point: Office 2007 sold like hotcakes, despite the ribbon, and it’s been selling in the multi-billion-dollar range ever since. As a result, the Office interface team figured they knew what consumers wanted, and old-timers were just pounding their canes and waggling toothless gums.

      The entire Office 2007 management team was transplanted, almost intact, to the Windows 8 effort. They saw an opportunity to transform the Windows interface, and they took it, over the strenuous objections of many of us in the peanut gallery. I’m convinced they figured it would play out like the Office ribbon. It didn’t. Windows 8 is, arguably, the largest software disaster in Microsoft’s history.

      Essentially all the Windows 8 management team — including some very talented and experienced people — left Microsoft shortly after that operating system shipped. With a thud. Their boss, Steve Ballmer, left Microsoft too. Ballmer’s still the largest individual shareholder in Microsoft, with 333,000,000 shares at last count, worth $31 billion and change.

      In their place, we’re seeing a new generation of managers taking care of Windows. The current head of the Windows effort, Joe Belfiore, oversaw the PC/Tablet/Phone department in the Operating Systems Group at Microsoft. Before Windows 10, he led program management for the Windows Phone team and the effort to create the Metro design language that we hated so much, the disliked Live Tiles, and the much-ignored Cortana.

      That said, Microsoft’s traditional PC market has sunk into a funk, and it appears to be on a slow ride into the sunset. Or it may just turn belly up and sink, anchored with mounds of iPhones, iPads, MacBooks, Galaxy Tabs, and Chromebooks. Or maybe, just maybe, Windows 10 will breathe some life back into the 35-year-old veteran. Yes, Windows 1.0 shipped in November 1985.

However things play out, at least we have an (admittedly highly modified) Start menu to work with, as shown in Figure 2-2.

      FIGURE 2-2: The new Start menu should look at least vaguely familiar to just about all experienced Windows users.

      THE “GET WINDOWS 10” DEBACLE

      No description of the recent history of Windows, however brief, can gloss over the fear and loathing that Microsoft induced with its Get Windows 10, or GWX, campaign.

      The campaign started shortly after the RTM release in July 2015, with a little-noticed program known as KB 3035583. In October 2015, Microsoft started force-updating Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 computers to Windows 10, without the owners’ knowledge or consent. A loud scream arose, and, a week after the forced upgrades started, they suddenly stopped. But the GWX campaign continued, showing increasingly persistent ads for Windows 10, all the symptoms of nagware, and even malware. Microsoft proved that it could reach into your Windows 7 machine and start the upgrade to Windows 10, whether you wanted it or not.

      The resultant clamor — from an unexpected appearance of a Windows 10 upgrade notification on a weather forecaster’s live news show, to Windows experts fretting over their relatives and friends, to more than 1 million posts on a Chinese blog — should have convinced Microsoft to back off. It didn’t. If you bump into people who don’t trust Windows or Microsoft, they have a good reason.

Exploring the Versions of Windows 10

      Microsoft has famously announced that Windows 10 is “the last version of Windows.” Which is to say, uh, Windows 10 is anything but the last version of Windows.

      

Instead of continuing Windows version numbers

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