It's not just Microsoft making a mess out of Windows. Third-party vendors are conspiring to ruin the PC platform. As often comes up in these discussions, I only use my PC for gaming. I've upgraded to 10, and downgraded back to 7 again, twice, just to make sure it really was that bad. (I downgraded both of my boys' PC's as well, just recently, because of strange problems they were always having.)

Last time I updated my nVidia video drivers, I found I had to create an account with nVidia to get into the configuration options of the driver on my machine. So, let me get this straight: I need to create an account... and log in... just to set the graphics options... on my own computer? Screw that! I downgraded to a driver that was over a year old, just to get away from all of nVidia's "improvements," like this "ShadowPlay" which was causing performance problems on my machine.

The driver for my execrable Razer Chroma keyboard was like this as well, but the build quality of that thing was so bad, I threw it out, and uninstalled the driver.

Microsoft has shifted into a whole new gear with Windows 10, and made it clear, despite user feedback, that they intend to stay the course, and continue the data collection, and advertising, and everything else that gets discussed on HN. I think this has sent a clear signal to the aftermarket vendors that they're free to do the same things, and we'll see more and more of it.

It looks like there are about 3 years of patches left for Windows 7. After that, there's Linux, Mac, Playstation, iDevices, and, now, the Switch for gaming. (Sadly, my boys already have an Xbox and an Xbox One.) There are plenty of other options to waste my time. I won't be upgrading to 10, and, thus, after 25 years building serious gaming rigs, I'm done buying any more PC kit. I just can't take all the hassle involved any more.