Windows 10 upgrade moves from optional to “recommended”

Microsoft’s Windows 10 continues to make some strides in gaining users and inching towards the ultimate goal of at least a billion users. Windows 10 just recently became the second-most installed operating system in January 2016 and is currently running on more than 200 million machines worldwide. Today, Microsoft is taking another step in its aggressive push to get Windows 10 upgraded on as many systems as possible.

According to ZDnet, Microsoft is starting on its planned transition to pushing Windows 10 as a “recommended” upgrade within the Windows Update service on Windows 7 and 8.X machines.

“As we shared in late October on the Windows Blog, we are committed to making it easy for our Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 customers to upgrade to Windows 10. We updated the upgrade experience today to help our customers, who previously reserved their upgrade, schedule a time for their upgrade to take place,” said a company spokesperson.

So far, Microsoft efforts to make it easier to upgrade to Windows 10–or harder to avoid doing so–having offered the “Get Windows 10” app moving to business users, as well as background downloading of Windows 10 bits to unsuspecting users. Today’s move is just another step in pushing Windows 10. Even enterprises are getting the hard-sell, as Microsoft let them know that they need to upgrade to Windows 10 or get left behind.

While Windows Update will offer Windows 10 as a recommended upgrade, and go so far as to prep the upgrade for installation on machines with automatic updates turned on, users will still need to accept the upgrade before moving forward. They’ll have to keep doing so, however, as the update will continue to be offered, and so eventually many users might be compelled to just accept the update rather than fighting it off forever.

If you haven’t upgraded yet to Windows 10, remember that you only have until July 29, 2016, to take advantage of the completely free upgrade. Windows 10 does add some compelling features, along with improved security, and so it’s a worthy upgrade. Just keep in mind that your efforts to refuse the upgrade just got a bit more complicated.