Win 11, Nope.

[Ole Anderson]

Upgraded to Win 11. It took me through it's choices including do I want Office 365 free for the first month. I hit the decline button. It took me to the credit card info screen saying it could be used whenever I entered my email. Already have that, so I hit the back button. No way out, couldn't even pull up the Task manager to kill the program. No X button up in the corner to kill the program. Stuck in a loop. So I filled in the credit card data and lo and behold, I now just subscribed to Office 365 even though I declined it multiple times. Finally did a hard restart and went in and reverted back to Win 10. And there I will stay. Microsoft can be a bad actor.

[Marc Fenneuff]

The old days of buying stuff once are fading fast. Companies want the recurring revenue. Think about the generation coming up that is being acclimated to the monthly subscription model for everything, especially video and music streaming, phone service, cloud storage, VPN, password managers, Amazon Prime, online periodicals. Heck, even the daily fancy coffee fix.

[Doug Garson]

What's really changed? In the good old days you paid a monthly or annual subscription for your newspaper, magazines, cable TV, internet access, Costco membership, gym membership, tennis club or golf club.

[Mike Henderson]

You may have a subscription to Office 365 based on what you described.

I don't remember anything like that when I converted to Win 11 - which is a good operating system.

Mike

[Jim Becker]

Something is amiss here...I was never asked about additional products like Office 365 while doing the upgrade to Win11, but it's true they have included trial versions of Office for many years. (Disclosure, I actually do subscribe to Office 365 and it's been worth every penny for the multiple computer/multiple family member licensing as well as "yuge" amounts of online storage that I use for both additional backup as well as image storage.

[Lee Schierer]

I upgraded to Win 11 as well and for the most part I like it. I don't recall whether or not there was an offer in the upgrade process or not. There was an offer when I first opened Win 10 on my new laptop. I use Open Office, which works just as well as the MS products and meets my needs. There are no fees for using it.

[Michael Schuch]

It took me a few hours to setup my new Windows 11 laptop and remove all the bloatware. Somehow I got past the Office 365 trap without entering a CC number, I forget how.

Then came hours of updates including a major OS update after which all the bloatware came back. It really makes one ponder running a Linux OS much more seriously.

I finally got my office 2012 license installed but still have to fight to keep OneDrive off of my laptop. (P.S. If you rearrange the letters in OneDrive is spells Herpes!)


P.S. OpenOffice is free and it will read and write Word, Excel, etc. formatted files: https://www.openoffice.org/

[Bill George]

Yup I had to re-install Win10 Pro on my Boot Camp install and it even had the hard to avoid Office 365 . Another vote for Open Office, used it for years, zero issues and yes I donate.

[Curt Harms]

To the open office users here. Open Office development has pretty much ceased. When Open Office came under the control of Oracle Corp. (speaking of scummy) most of the developers said "See Ya", forked Open Office and created Libre Office. So Libre Office sees most of the development today. At least that's my understanding of it.

[Ole Anderson]

FYI, I am running Office 2019. Works fine for me.

[Kev Williams]

I have one win8 computer, that's actually fairly pleasant to use thanks to "Classic Shell", which is an interface that bypasses all the win8 'stupid screen' stuff and makes it look and work exactly like XP or 7. It WILL work like a normal win8 if you want, but I don't want...

I have one win10 laptop that I would use for target practice if it wasn't because I do my own taxes, since now even win8 won't work with TurboTax. I have like 8 computers running win7 Ultimate 64, two running win7 pro 32, 2 XP's (one as backup for the other one) and one 98se (necessary to accept the LPT port security dongle to run a 1991 graphics program I still use daily)...

My 7 Ultimate 64's with 16+ gigs of ram and SSD drives work like lightning. Everything I do on them is near instantaneous. They boot up from unplugged in less than 20 seconds...

My supposedly 'superior' win10 laptop- installed on a wiped HP originally with win8- isn't even usable for at least 10 minutes from a cold start. Once I CAN use it, every mouse click or key push is like waiting for a table at Denny's on Mothers Day. Other than TurboTax it is completely useless to me. And from the pros & cons I hear about 11, mostly cons IMO, not going to bother until I HAVE to.

-and I'm running Office 2007 on all my computers ;)

[Chris Parks]

I am another one who did not have any problems avoiding 365 when upgrading from 10 to 11, I don't need to use MS's offer of storage as I have my own offsite backups and use 2013 MS Office with no problems. What I do find annoying is Google's persistent pop ups trying to persuade me to change to Chrome.