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> Microsoft has put a lot of effort and billions of dollars into Windows 10 for all of our benefit. And basically Windows 10 works well, it supports our new hardware, it does a lot and provides a secure platform for computer applications and programs that we depend on.

I'd second all of that. With the possible exception of "for all of our benefit". [tinfoil_hat] I suspect it was mostly for the benefit of their marketing partners and the government. [/tinfoil_hat]

Win10 runs great, under the hood. I'd like to use it more. In fact I'd even switch my allegiance from Win7 to Win10, if they would only:

Allow use of a true Win7 theme (graphical interface and desktop elements).
It's entirely possible. They just refuse to do it. Total arrogance.
Allow use of complete settings dialogs like in previous OS editions.
Put the d@mn settings back in the dialogs, under "Advanced" if they want. It's not like the options were taken out of the Registry. They were just made unavailable through the dialogs. Total arrogance.

That's it. I'd become a big Win10 fan.

Sure, I'd rather they didn't push the updates, but I can tolerate them. And I'd rather not have to disable their spyware/telemetry settings again every time they push an update. But those things are a minor annoyance compared to having a GUI that is simply too stupid and unusable to do anything other than launch Microsoft Office.

But that's what Windows has become. It's no longer an operating system as we have defined operating systems for 50 years. It's just another "platform" for Microsoft's applications, more and more of which are cloud-based anyway. In another update or two, it'll be indistinguishable from Chrome-OS on a Google ChromeBook.

Oh well, sic transit.

I suspect it was mostly for the benefit of their marketing partners and the government.

I was trying to be nice... I suppose that Microsoft was hoping to beat Apple to a trillion dollars in market valuation. (Too late as of this afternoon.) Under Satya Narayana Nadella’s leadership Microsoft's stock price has more than doubled in the last few years, but all this nickel and diming with annoyances such as popups, and other “notifications” trying to get you to buy stuff has caused the experience to be degraded somewhat.

The thing that amazes me the most is that the first XP clone that I put together decades ago was a very efficient tool with its 8088 processor running at 4.77 MHz, 640KBs of RAM, ultra-deluxe EGA monitor, and hooked up to a dot matrix printer. I used DOS, and a shareware menu system to run Lotus 123, Word Perfect and other programs on two 5 1/4” floppys with no hard drive. It was a much less frustrating experience than computing today and I was in general more productive than I am these days. I still have it in a closet.