This weekend, Microsoft once again landed on my (insert profane term for excrement) list. About three and a half years ago, I bought a super high-end custom Sager 9150 laptop to serve as my primary work machine. At the time, it was about as RAM and SSD rich as possible, and it cost a mint. It was my main machine, and my main cycle-burners often require top-end power and their cost reflects that expense.

In any case, the Sager lasted about 15 months before I needed something even more powerful for my main work machine. But that didn't mean I retired the Sager. I just moved it off my desk area to run our big screen.

My house is also where my wife and I work, so we have a lot of systems set up to do double duty. While we have a big screen TV that can be used for Game of Thrones binge watching, it's tied to the Sager and is often used as a conference room white board, collaborative writing environment, and design space. I'm also sitting comfortably on the couch right now, using it to write this article.

We rely on that Sager. It runs Windows 7 and - until recently - has been rock-solid. That is, it was rock-solid until Microsoft started to harass us about upgrading the Sager to Windows 10.

Let's make this clear: it is not wise to upgrade this machine to Windows 10. It is a custom-built one-off machine with specially-tuned drivers. When I last contacted the folks at Sager about upgrading it, they started mumbling about inadvisability and you takes your chances. In other words, it's not supported.

My Sager 9150 was designed and lovingly optimized for Windows 7. No one knows what would happen if a Windows 10 upgrade were to be attempted, but everyone there generally shares the hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck feeling of it-would-be-ungood.

As I said back in July, I have no intention of upgrading the Sager to Windows 10. But Windows 7 on the Sager no longer agrees with that plan. A few months back, I started to get the GWXUX error shown at the top of this article. It means that the Get Windows 10 nag process is failing.

ince the message only showed up once every few weeks, I ignored it. But apparently, Microsoft really wants me to upgrade, because this weekend, the message has been showing up pretty much constantly.