Tech stories when it comes to MS always take one mundane issue and amps it up to such a cartoonish level, that it ceases to resemble reality and just becomes a parody.
My windows 7 machine at work gets this message once every other week. I click the x and go on with my life.
If this is driving you insane, then you need to seek some professional help.
That has been my experience also once every week or two a pop up from the tray and I click it away, I never see any other ads, I think because of all the spying MS does they probably know I will shoot them if they harass me.
As another FReeper who runs a different technology company's ping list (and I'm not naming the company or the person) once said, "Haters got to hate."
True, but of course it's not just Microsoft. The exact same thing happens to Apple at the same or higher rate (higher only because headline writers wet themselves over the chance to put "Apple" in a critical headline. It's not about Microsoft or Apple, it's about tech writers whores.
> My windows 7 machine at work gets this message once every other week. I click the x and go on with my life.
You're one of the lucky ones (as am I) -- the nags are rare. There are some folks who, for reasons I haven't yet discovered, get bothered daily. We lucky ones shouldn't assume everybody is so lucky.
> If this is driving you insane, then you need to seek some professional help.
Could well be they do.
For my part, I've switched over full-time from Win7 to Win10 on my dayjob (System Admin) Windows workstation (a VM under CentOS, for those times only Windows will do). I found that without resorting to any third-party bolt-ons (e.g. Classic Shell) I was able to get the Win10 UI beat into submission sufficiently that it isn't all that different from Win7 in most important regards. The only thing that remains is style -- the stupid plain Metro look-and-feel that works so well on a hand-held and looks like early-90's crap on a widescreen desktop monitor. I'm hoping to find a theme somewhere that can override the remnants of Metro.
But in all other respects, I gotta admit that after a day spent finding where they hid the stuff I actually use, I am able to get work done admirably, and the response of the OS is downright snappy.