There are still a few users on old Windows 10 Technical Preview builds from 2014. In a few days, there won't be: their computers will refuse to boot. The affected builds that will completely brick themselves on April 30th are 9841, 9860, and 9879. You cannot accuse Microsoft of surprising users though, because Windows has been notifying them since April 2nd and force-rebooting every three hours since April 15th if they didn't take the warnings seriously. The current batch of builds are valid until October.
WinBeta has linked this policy to Microsoft's rumored piracy policy. My thoughts? No.
This is actually typical of Microsoft when it comes to pre-release operating systems. In fact, the only difference between this and Vista's pre-release (ex: “Beta 2”) expiration is that Microsoft relaxed the reboot time to three hours. It was two hours back in the Vista era but otherwise identical. That policy only applied to the previews then, and I see no reason to believe that it will be extended to released operating systems now.
Granted, with the Windows 10 continuous update structure, it does raise concern about what will happen if/when Microsoft releases a build that users don't want. For instance, imagine Microsoft decides to cut off legacy support for Win32 — will customers have the ability to opt-out of the upgrade treadmill and continue to use applications that are then unsupported, like practically every Steam game they own?
But I see no reason to think that this policy has anything to do with that.
I don’t know if this will be
I don’t know if this will be the same for the retail version of windows. I would hope that they would allow users to refuse to update like they currently do. If they do this for the retail version people in enterprise environments would go crazy.
Like I said, I seriously
Like I said, I seriously doubt that this would be implemented into retail.
Some other way of forcing users forward? Maybe… and that's concerning.
The notification bombardment
The notification bombardment and forced reboots are already implemented as one of Window’s anti-piracy features for the last few OSes. It isn’t triggered for OSes that fail to apply service patches (AKA point updates for 8.1 onward), those are just pushed through Windows Update and can be manually disabled by the user with ease.
Is the term ‘bricking’ really
Is the term ‘bricking’ really applied to software nowadays? It makes no sense. Permanently disabling hardware makes it as good as a brick, but you can’t make a brick out of disfunctional software.
I feel old.
Heh. That’s a fair point. You
Heh. That's a fair point. You can always install a different OS on it and so "bricking" might not be the best word.
The best advice is to not run
The best advice is to not run beta OS software as your primary OS. I have had Win10 running happily in a VirtualBox VM on the fast ring. That way I can test without blowing up my workflow. Of course if testing hardware is your thing, that won’t help, but I’m not sure how close this Win10 is to release.