No, you don't necessarily need Windows 10.
No, you don't necessarily need Windows 10.
I understand it can be a bit tricky. Still, I believe it performs better than Windows 7 and 8 did. The main advice I can give is to ensure it’s running only on your machine—otherwise, searching online will be a real hassle.
Everything has some form of bundled software these days. I find it is easy to just delete all of the items you are talking about and on top of that I have been on windows 10 since the testing days and none of these items have magically come back. On top of that for your average user there is little to no downside for leaving these on the machine... you give up what... maybe 200mb? For the average person the out-of-hours reboot is a good thing. It picks a time frame that most people are not on their machine and does a reboot to make sure they are running the latest versions of windows, defender, and security patches. So the benefits far out weight the cons here for your average user. I would much rather see the majority of people more secure and be inconveniences by a reboot once every blue moon. People need to get over this data collection crap. This has been going on for a decade and only really came to light with the facebook incident. If you are browsing the web or pretty much doing anything on your pc or phone then chances are you are being tracked in one form or another. Windows does collect certain NON-PII data. They use it to improve your experience, to possibly sell for a profit, but then again it keeps the cost of windows down for you as well. On top of that you can disable much of this practice and they aren't using or sharing information that can be used to identify YOU. This is pretty much common practice everywhere now. Destroyed their trust with windows 8? I used windows 8 as well. The thing is people as a whole rather complain about change than embrace it. So people were upset they lost their start menu, well a quick 3rd party download would restore it. So I can understand why people were put off, it was a little harder to get use to coming from a version with a start menu, that being said there was nothing wrong with it as a whole. Just people didn't like having to learn something new. As for market share.. there are still plenty of people running 8800 gtxs and 2xx and 4xx nvidia GPU's. Probably in about the same rate that you are seeing windows 7 machines. So this is nothing new, there will be people with outdated hardware and software regardless... and often these people are not tech savvy and are using what they have on their prebuild system. Some of these people did the free upgrade, others didn't know what it was, and some others just missed the free upgrade window. Still the number will continue to grow. We still are seeing very little actual dx12 titles so when they become more mainstream I would expect to see that gap close relatively quickly for gamers.
Windows 10 is an excellent operating system, and I believe it’s definitely worth considering. I was able to include Windows 10 in my installation because I used the PC part picker, so if you’re getting a new build, it makes sense to go with it.
I wasn't familiar with those constraints... That's what will stop Windows 7 from gaining traction. Users would need systems with over 8/16GB RAM. Honestly, it's not worth using. When looking for Steam, an Edge recommendation appears followed by two .exe files. It's completely pointless. Online searches shouldn't be considered, I rarely open the Start menu to look up anything.
People believed Microsoft wouldn’t improve the issue via an update because data gathering had already been integrated into Windows 7 for a long time.
Offering it at no cost doesn’t cancel the requirement that a key must be purchased once the grace period ends. Nonetheless, Microsoft isn’t focused on chasing individual users because targeting businesses with 100 unlicensed Windows installations is more lucrative. They can impose fines on them for not acquiring enough licenses to match the number in use.
Most EULAs aren’t likely to be legally enforceable since you didn’t sign a formal contract. There was no money exchanged, and it was handled through proper channels. If they truly wanted to, they could enforce it, but doing so would risk damaging their market position. In business contexts, eulas tend to carry more weight than in casual settings. I’m not a legal professional, just someone trying to understand the situation.