MICROSOFT’S DECISION TO install Windows 10 on people’s computers without notifying them has come back to bite it after it was forced to pay out a settlement.

The company paid out $10,000 (€9,029) to a woman from California after automatically installing Windows 10 on her PC. According to the Seattle Times, Teri Goldstein’s work computer would crash and be unusable for days at a time after the update installed.

Microsoft’s customer support didn’t fix the issue so she took it to court seeking compensation for lost wages and the cost of a new PC. She won the case and was paid the €10,000 judgement after Microsoft dropped an appeal.

Microsoft has been offering Windows 10 as a free update for those using Windows 7 and 8.1. Since the offer is only valid for its first year of release, the company had been trying to get as many people using it as possible.

The update would allow Windows to follow a similar approach to Apple iOS and Google Android, keeping everyone on one main operating system and updating it regularly with improvements and security fixes.

More than 300 million devices are running it, and Microsoft aims to have one billion devices running it by 2018. However, it has been criticised for the way it has pushed the update onto users.

Some of the approaches it has taken include downloading the files needed without telling users, and changing the update from optional to ‘recommended’ which downloads it automatically.

Another issue was changing the pop-up box so that by closing it, users were agreeing to the update instead of delaying it.

Those update notifications will stop at the end of July when the one year free upgrade comes to an end.

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