Steve Gibson’s Never 10 Helps You Turn Off the Windows 10 Upgrade

The inestimable Steve Gibson has chimed in with his own utility for preventing your Windows 7/8.x-based PC from ever upgrading to Windows 10 without your consent. Called Never 10, it gives control back to the user.

Thanks to Michael, who tipped me off about this utility via email –Paul

Gibson’s Never 10 is free, and it follows a similar tool, called GWX Control Panel, which also seeks to perform the same magic. But since Mr. Gibson is a known good source of high quality and trusted software, you should at least know about this option too.

According to Gibson, Never 10…

Disables the automatic upgrade to Windows 10. You can also later run it again to re-enable this capability if you change your mind.

Works with both Windows 7 and 8.1. These are of course the two Windows versions that are seeing the Get Windows 10 advertisement and, more chillingly, are sometimes (apparently) being upgraded without user consent.

Does not install any software. Like most of Gibson’s offerings, Never 10 is an executable. So you just run it, and it doesn’t install anything on your PC. You can delete it when you’re done.

Quickly and simply performs the required system editing at your prompt, so you never need to worry about that pesky advertisement again.

I don’t have a Windows 7/8.1 system handy at the moment, so I’ve not been able to test Never 10 yet. But I’m restoring my mother’s Windows 7 laptop today, so I’ll take a look at that later, and configure her PC to not accept the upgrade requests.

You can learn more from the Never 10 web site.