Wow, "tinfoil hat?" Haven't heard that one before.
All kidding aside, it's a credit to this forum in general that it took me two weeks to come across the same kind of dismissive trolling that any other outlet seems to provide the moment "Win7" escapes your keyboard these days. Around here I've gotten actual answers. Probably wouldn't have been able to get my new 7Pro desktop running otherwise.
But for the record: I gave Win10 the college try. For a good three years and counting, now. My current laptop came with 7 on it and since my desktop at the time had 7, I figured I'd go ahead with the upgrade just for versatility reasons. Since then I've had to laboriously go through the registry and group policy to turn off (most of) the telemetry, fight the update system several times to prevent auto-rebooting before turning them off completely because it refused to listen, run O&OShutup10 whose changes frequently get reverted, learn that 10 ignores any instructions in the hosts file to avoid connecting to its severs necessitating that you block them on the router level (which is pointless since, y'know, this is a laptop and it has to go on other networks sometimes), and put up with the terrible "app" form replacements to Windows accessories (e.g. Calculator, Paint) and large parts of Control Panel because apparently a stripped-down mobile interface is what we all want for our desktop machines. And for all that, the number of actual benefits gained over 7 as far as I'm concerned remains a big fat zero (unless you're going to argue that whatever post-EOS security updates MS releases for 10 are more important to security than, say, common sense, in which case I don't know what to tell you).
You'll note that none of the above can be blamed on hardware quirkiness for a machine that wasn't designed for 10. If I were including that, I might blame 10 for the fact I've had to remove the laptop's optical drive completely from device manager lest the machine crash within a minute of detecting it. I've been saying for the last year or two that the moment the laptop gets bricked for any software-based reason, I'm restoring its factory image and never going back to 10. Hasn't happened yet, but maybe 2020 will be the year.
As hubgod alluded to, no OS is perfect and every new Windows has made some missteps. 7 is no exception IMO. But in every Windows OS upgrade since the 3.1 days, I've found each new OS to be either good or, at worst, a mixed bag (except for 8, but let's not talk about 8). I specifically consider 10 a downgrade because it actually requires more tweaking than 7 to make it workable, and because for all its faults, it brings practically nothing new to the table for anyone who couldn't care less about MS' attempts to create a multi-platform quasi-mobile ecosystem and just wants a functional desktop machine. Obviously, at some point it will become completely impractical to find suitable hardware or software for 7, but only due to the well-established march of time (read: planned obsolescence) rather than any good reason.
So I wonder: am I a tinfoil hat because after three years I made an informed decision to stick with 7? Or because I even bothered to try turning 10's crap off?
