Have you tried delaying feature updates? The "higher" your edition, the longer you get to delay them. I got Windows 10 Professional, and the first thing I did was set those updates to be delayed for a year (I figure by then their involuntarily crowdsourced QA will resulted in a relatively stable build). I haven't had any serious problems yet.
Don't get me wrong, though, I hate what Microsoft is doing to Windows and I think this is all stupid and sad.
You seem like the perfect target for a Linux based laptop.
Buy an SSD and install Ubuntu on your current laptop to see if it has any problems?
Otherwise I bought an XPS (despite my long term hatred of Dell hardware) and they have good Linux support.
Installing Windows in a VM is way easier, and you can control updates better in some fairly dirty ways (snapshots, firewall etc).